gripper

Soft Robotics, a Bedford, Mass., startup, is using NVIDIA Isaac Sim to help close the ‘sim to real gap’ for robotic gripping applications. One area is perfecting gripping for pick and placement of foods for packaging. Unlike other industries that have adopted robotics, the $8 trillion food market has been slow to develop robots to handle variable items in unstructured environments, says Soft Robotics.

From tiny grains of rice to a water bottle, the robotic hand designed by SUTD can pick and place items safely and reliably to meet the dynamic demands of food, logistics and consumer goods industries.

A gripper robot has been developed that can grasp all types of objects, from very fine or thin objects such as acupuncture needles and sewing needles to large objects such as boxes.

Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have designed a new type of soft, robotic gripper that uses a collection of thin tentacles to entangle and ensnare objects, similar to how jellyfish collect stunned prey.

Rice University mechanical engineers are using legs of deceased spiders as mechanical grippers that can blend into natural environments while picking up objects, like other insects, that outweigh them. An open-access study in Advanced Science outlines the process by which Preston and lead author Faye Yap harnessed a spider’s physiology in a first step toward a novel area of research they call “necrobotics.”

Large, unwieldy bags of dog food, non-airtight clothing or consumer goods packages, and bulky, porous cardboard boxes. These are just some examples of demanding packaging and palletizing applications that OnRobot’s new VGP20 gripper can address. VGP20 is, according to OnRobot,  the world’s most-powerful electric vacuum gripper.

Scientists often look to nature for cues when designing robots – some robots mimic human hands while others simulate the actions of octopus arms or inchworms. Now, researchers in the University of Georgia College of Engineering have designed a new soft robotic gripper that draws inspiration from an unusual source: pole beans.

OnRobot has launched the 2FG7, a complete, low cost, easy to use, out-of-the-box, cleanroom-ready parallel gripper.