Our friend Carlos made the Flexible Robot Gripper shown above. It’s based on the one made by a team at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and iRobot demonstrated in the video below. I wonder if this is the future of robot grippers? I worked in a company where the robot we were working with had the typical grippers and when programming them there was no room for error since a mm of error meant that the object was dropped. You can see the materials that Carlos used below, I am thinking that most of the build cost is tied up in the balloon. 🙂
“Materials
- A party balloon (silver in my case)
- A piece of plastic tubing (I used a hose fitting I had lying around)
- A piece of cloth
- Ground coffee (I use some very old coffee I found in my freezer)
- A rubber band.
- Functional lungs (unfortunately, my vacuum pump is dead)”