MIT develops very skillful robot grippers The robots are coming (episode 4)

MIT develops very skillful robot grippers The robots are coming (episode 4)

15. Juli 2020 0 Von Horst Buchwald

The robots are coming (episode 4)
MIT develops very skillful robot grippers

New York, July 15, 2020

MIT researchers have succeeded in developing a robotic gripper with soft, sensitive fingers that can handle cables with unprecedented skill.
The team first constructed a new type of two-finger gripper. The opposite fingers are easy and quick to move and allow quick adjustments of force and position in real time. At the fingertips are vision-based „GelSight“ sensors made of soft rubber with embedded cameras. The gripper is mounted on a robotic arm that can move as part of the control system.
The team’s second step was to create a perception and control framework that would allow cable manipulation. For perception, they used the GelSight sensors to estimate the position of the cable between their fingers and to measure the frictional forces when the cable was sliding. Two controls run in parallel: one modulates the grip strength, while the other adjusts the gripper position to hold the cable in the gripper.
When mounted on the arm, the gripper can reliably follow a USB cable from a random grip position. Then, in combination with a second gripper, the robot can move the cable “hand over hand” (as a human would do) to find the end of the cable.
The next skill the robot demonstrated was connecting an earphone to a cell phone.
„Manipulating soft objects is as common in our daily lives as manipulating cables, folding fabrics and knotting cords,“ wrote Yu She, postdoc and lead author at MIT, in a new article about the system. „In many cases, we want robots to help people with this type of work, especially when the tasks are repetitive, boring, or unsafe.“
The team found that the convex surface of the GelSight sensor made it difficult to pull the cable back at the edge of the finger. That is why they now want to improve the shape of the finger sensor.
In the future, they plan to investigate more complex cable manipulation tasks such as cable routing and cable entry through obstacles, and finally to investigate autonomous cable manipulation tasks in the automotive industry.
Yu wrote the work with MIT PhD students Shaoxiong Wang, Siyuan Dong and Neha Sunil. Alberto Rodriguez, MIT Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering; and Edward Adelson, the John and Dorothy Wilson professor at the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.