Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material

By Eric Brown, Nicholas Rodenberg, J. Amend, Annan Mozeika, E. Steltz, M. R. Zakin, Hod Lipson, Heinrich M. Jaeger. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010

1,546 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gripping and holding of objects are key tasks for robotic manipulators. The development of universal grippers able to pick up unfamiliar objects of widely varying shape and surface properties remains, however, challenging. Most current designs are based on the multifingered hand, but this approach introduces hardware and software complexities. These include large numbers of controllable joints, the need for force sensing if objects are to be handled securely without crushing them, and the computational overhead to decide how much stress each finger should apply and where. Here we demonstrate a completely different approach to a universal gripper. Individual fingers are replaced by a single mass of granular material that, when pressed onto a target object, flows around it and conforms to its shape. Upon application of a vacuum the granular material contracts and hardens quickly to pinch and hold the object without requiring sensory feedback. We find that volume changes of less than 0.5% suffice to grip objects reliably and hold them with forces exceeding many times their weight. We show that the operating principle is the ability of granular materials to transition between an unjammed, deformable state and a jammed state with solid-like rigidity. We delineate three separate mechanisms, friction, suction, and interlocking, that contribute to the gripping force. Using a simple model we relate each of them to the mechanical strength of the jammed state. This advance opens up new possibilities for the design of simple, yet highly adaptive systems that excel at fast gripping of complex objects.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Control and Systems Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed3ebebf58d5b9286f6e4da0e3ccb7b24ff1e3b5

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Citations in the corpus

Materials that couple sensing, actuation, computation, and communication (2015, neutral): “Similarly, particle jamming (53) is a technique where a granular ma-”
Soft-matter composites with electrically tunable elastic rigidity (2013, methodology): “Current methods for tunable stiffness require external pumps and valves for gel hydration [1, 2] and pneumatic particle jamming [3, 4], large electromagnets to activate magnetorheological (MR) fluids [5, 6] and elastomers [7], and motors for variable stiffness springs [8].”
Rearrangement: A Challenge for Embodied AI (2020, background): “Examples of manipulator types include: the “magic pointer” abstraction, “sticky mit-tens” [56], suction-based grippers [10], needle/stick force applicators, parallel jaw grippers, and 5-ﬁnger humanoid grippers (see relevant survey in [71]).”
A Recipe for Soft Fluidic Elastomer Robots (2015, neutral): “An alternative to positive pressure actuated soft grippers is the robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material developed in Brown et al.(54) Another relevant piece of work is the manually operated 3D elastomer tentacles developed by Martinez et al.”
Lessons from the Amazon Picking Challenge: Four Aspects of Building Robotic Systems (2016, background): “Grasp planning can benefit substantially from embodiment, as exemplified by simple under-actuated robotic hands [9, 14, 15, 35].”
A Novel Layer Jamming Mechanism With Tunable Stiffness Capability for Minimally Invasive Surgery (2013, background): “Particle jamming technology using granular media has recently been researched as another way to achieve tunable stiffness [10].”
Design and Analysis of a Robust, Low-cost, Highly Articulated manipulator enabled by jamming of granular media (2012, background): “Rather, local tunable stiffness is coupled with off-board spooler motors and tension cables to achieve complex manipulator configurations.”
Soft Manipulators and Grippers: A Review (2016, background): “Indeed, the universal gripper (Brown et al., 2010) is exploiting the fact that small particles trapped inside a flexible material can become very hard and stiff if a vacuum is applied.”
Soft Robotics: New Perspectives for Robot Bodyware and Control (2014, positive): “…more safely with the natural, unstructured environment and with humans, and that better deal with uncertain and dynamic tasks [i.e., grasping and manipulation of unknown objects (Brown et al., 2010), locomotion in rough terrains (Lin et al., 2011), physical contacts with human bodies, etc.].”
Cartman: The Low-Cost Cartesian Manipulator that Won the Amazon Robotics Challenge (2017, background): “There is a long history of research into grasping and dexterous manipulation [1], and recent progress has largely been driven by technological developments such as stronger, more precise and more readily available collaborative robotic arms [2] and simple compliant and universal grippers [3], [4], [”