Cornell Creates Awesome Robotic Hand Unlike Any Other
The human hand is a complex and intricate piece of machinery. Which has meant that practically all attempts to duplicate it have been complex, fragile and expensive.
Since most grippers designed to do complex tasks have been based on it, that means most precision grippers are enormously expensive. Not so with Cornell’s new gripper, however, thanks to one clear fact: it’s not based on the human hand.
Cornell’s new hand is cheap. Like, really cheap. But then, the prototype is literally just a rubber balloon filled with sand. Which begs the question: how does it grip? See, sand acts a lot like a fluid much of the time. If flows around things. So to get the hand into position to grip, all the gripper does is press up against an object. The sand in the rubber bag flows around it in a way that can grip.
Then, to grip, the air is sucked out of the bag.
Sand is granular, misshapen. While when its not being squeezed together it is still loose enough to move like a liquid, these misshapen chunks mean that, when the pressure is on, the sand locks together. Think of it like when you add water to sand. It instantly becomes more rigid. Similar concept.
The sand locks into the position that the hand was put in, locking around whatever it happened to be gripping, at whatever angle it happened to be gripping it. Meaning you get a gripper able to grip just about anything, from any angle, for the cost of a rubber balloon, some sand, and an air compressor.
This hand can’t manipulate things once it has a grip on it, of course, but for many cases that’s not actually a requirement. Much of the time, simply being able to pick things up is enough.
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