Researchers at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and iRobot have teamed to design a Universal Gripper designed to give robots a real hand.

The gripper, created under a program supported by DARPA, involves a robotic arm that has a regular latex party balloon where its hand might otherwise be. The balloon is filled with ground coffee -- no need to go high end with Starbucks, as any variety will do. The coffee-packed balloon presses down on the object it is lifting, say a spring or raw egg or light bulb (as shown in this video) and squishes around the object. A vacuum then sucks air from the balloon to firm up its grip on the object.

“The concept of a jamming transition was developed to provide a unified framework for understanding and predicting behavior in a wide range of disordered, amorphous materials that all can be driven into a ‘glassy’ state, where they respond like a solid yet structurally resemble a liquid. This includes many liquids, colloids, emulsions or foams, and also particulate matter consisting of macroscopic grains,” said University of Chicago physicist Heinrich Jaeger (shown above). “What is particularly neat with the gripper is that here we have a case where a new concept in basic science provided a fresh perspective in a very different area, robotics, and then opened the door to applications none of us had originally thought about.”

The Universal Gripper "uses the same phenomenon that makes a vacuum–packed bag of ground coffee so firm," according to the University of Chicago.

Hod Lipson, Cornell associate professor of mechanical engineering and computer science, added in a statement: "The ground coffee grains are like lots of small gears. When they are not pressed together they can roll over each other and flow. When they are pressed together just a little bit, the teeth interlock, and they become solid."

Rice, couscous and ground-up tires were also tried as possible materials, but coffee won out because of its lightness, among other things.

Lipson says the technology could be marketable soon and used for applications such as defusing bombs, picking up dangerous materials in factories or as prosthetic limbs.

The researchers' report on their work has been published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Much research is ongoing to give robots more human-like qualities, including efforts at the University of California, Berkeley to devise artificial skin that would let robots feel.

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