That squishy dollop of brilliance that is the jamming robot gripper has learned a new trick: roboticists at Cornell and the University of Chicago have taught it to throw stuff.
Just as a quick refresher, all the gripper is, is a latex balloon filled with coffee grounds. The grounds move around each other like grains of sand and can conform to objects and complex surfaces, but when air is pumped out of the balloon, the grounds all “jam” together into a solid mass, yielding a strong hold on whatever the gripper is in contact with. It’s simple, it’s cheap, and you can pick up just about anything without having to calculate optimal grasping points or do anything else in the way of sensing or computation: you really just stuff the gripper against an object, pump the air out, and off you go.
via IEEE Spectrum
February 14, 2012
