Engineers bring a soft touch to commercial robotics

Added on 04 January 2022

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Engineers bring a soft touch to commercial robotics

Inspired by the natural dexterity of the human hand, a team of engineers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has created a reconfigurable hybrid robotics system that is able to grip a variety of objects: from the small, soft and delicate to the large, heavy and bulky. This technology is expected to impact a range of industries, involving food assembly, vertical farming and fast-moving consumer goods packaging, which will progressively automate more of their operations in the coming years.

Led by Associate Professor Raye Yeow from the NUS Department of Biomedical Engineering and the NUS Advanced Robotics Centre, the hybrid robotic grippers use soft, flexible 3D-printed fingers with a reconfigurable gripper base. The robotic innovation is now in the process of being brought to commercial partners under the team's start-up RoPlus (RO+), comprising NUS researchers Low Jin Huat, Khin Phone May, Chen Chao-Yu and undergraduate student Han Qian Qian.

"An object's shape, texture, weight and size affect how we choose to grip them. This is one of the main reasons why many industries still heavily rely on human labor to package and handle delicate items," Assoc Prof Yeow said. "Our hybrid robotic gripper technology revolutionizes traditional pick-and-place tasks by offering advanced capabilities that allow robots to safely interact with delicate items of various shapes, sizes and stiffness, just like the human hand."

Bio-inspired gripping solutions

Gripping is one of the most common and natural tasks that people perform, but for robots, it is not as intuitive. To achieve human-like gripping abilities, robots need computer vision and deep learning to detect the type of objects in front of them as well as their orientation. The gripper can then automatically decide on how best to pick and place objects to minimize the necessity of intensive human intervention.

With the aim of developing robotic grippers that are as dexterous as human hands, the NUS team came up with hybrid robotic grippers, consisting of three or four soft fingers, which can reconfigure on demand. The fingers are air-driven and equipped with a novel locking mechanism for adjustable stiffness. The NUS team has developed three types of hybrid robotic gripper systemsalmost like three different hands that are useful in different contexts.

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