Unique Robot Gripper Uses Party Balloon and Coffee

Robot Grippers

One of the problems with making robots is designing a gripper that will handle many different shapes and sizes of items easily. What is a robotic gripper? A robotic gripper is the part of the robot at the end of an arm usually that is kind of like a hand though it probably doesn't look like a hand. It's job it to pick things up and manipulate them. So what the robotics industry has come up with is basically grippers for every conceivable job. This sounds like a good idea at first if you are only doing one thing at a time or your company has a huge budget and can afford many different gripper types or better yet many different robots. That way you can get all the jobs done efficiently.

Universal Robotic Gripper

Students at Cornell University to solve the robotic gripper problem have come up with a unique solution to this big problem. They've takes a simple childs party balloon and filled it with ground coffee. When you push this balloon over an item the coffee in the balloon flows around the object like a liquid just like if you were pouring ground coffee out of the bag. Then after you push the Universal Gripper down on the object they use vacuum to suck all the remaining air out of the party balloon. So what remains is the Coffee in this vaccum environment locked on to the item you are trying to manipulate. Basically how this works is that since the granules of coffee are not round they will flow like a liquid when they are not compressed. But when they are compressed they act like little gears rubbing against each other and they won't move thus enabling the gripper to be closed one second then opened the next. Check out the video it shows it better than I can explain it. One of the nice things about this is it's something you can make in your garage.

This Universal Robotic Gripper is For You

If you are a maker or someone who is into robotics or just building stuff in your garage the reason this is for you is because the design is so simple. Simply the balloon, coffee, vaccuum pump and some valves and switches so not so hard to build compared to some of the other gripper designs that are out there. Don't get me wrong they are artistically beutifull if you are in to that type of thing but they are difficult to use and build.