Fingerless Robotic Hand Can Pick Anything

"A small bag filled with coffee grounds is lending robots a fingerless hand. The new kind of gripper, described online the week of October 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is capable of grasping all sorts of different objects with ease.

"This could be game-changing technology," says mechanical engineer Peko Hosoi of MIT, who was not involved with the new study. "The idea is so simple, yet effective and robust."

The simple gripper is made of a bag of coffee grounds and a vacuum, though other grains such as couscous and sand also work, says study coauthor Eric Brown of the University of Chicago. To pick something up, the bag of loose grounds first melds around the object. Then, as a vacuum sucks air out of the spaces between grains, the gripper stiffens, packing itself into a hard vice molded to the outline of the object. Reducing the bag's starting volume by just a teeny amount — less than 1 percent of the total — was enough to make the gripper latch on, the team found.

This transition from fluidlike behavior (such as dry sand flowing out of a bucket) to solid (a hard-packed sand castle) is a physical process called "jamming." Because the gripper's bulb conforms to any shape evenly before the vacuum jams it, it's extremely versatile. "Our goal was to pick up objects where you don't know what you're dealing with ahead of time," Brown says."

Read more at Wired (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)