A team of researchers from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) has developed a soft robotic gripper inspired by the tip of an elephant's trunk.
According to its developers, EleTac addresses a challenge encountered by soft grippers built from flexible materials that can bend and deform. Although such soft grippers can grasp items more gently than rigid iterations — making them appropriate for tasks such as handling fruit, baked goods, lab samples and medical supplies — they also need to manipulate objects much like humans.
Source: Professor Van Anh Ho, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Soft robotic grippers require a sense of touch to detect contact, force, object shape and finger position to achieve this capability. However, incorporating sensors is challenging because the flexible materials bend and stretch, making conventional sensors impractical without reducing flexibility or limiting sensing coverage.
As such, the JAIST team developed the elephant trunk-inspired soft robotic gripper by combining object grasping with high-resolution tactile sensing and proprioception — which enables a robot to sense the position and movement of its own body.
EleTac is a soft robotic gripper that uses the combination of a single internal fisheye camera and deep learning to detect tactile information by analyzing how its flexible fingers deform while grasping objects. During lab tests, EleTac successfully handled a wide range of delicate and everyday objects and completed touch-based tasks like retrieving a buried pen and cleaning curved tableware. The team suggests that EleTac has shown promise for potential applications in industry and service robotics.
"With the ability to detect contact and apply gentle forces, soft robots may be able to assist with everyday tasks, support elderly or vulnerable individuals, and perform operations that are difficult for today's rigid robotic systems. We envision safer and more capable robots that can work alongside people in homes, hospitals and public spaces in the near future," its developers concluded.
An article detailing the gripper, “EleTac: Elephant Trunk Tip-Inspired Soft Gripper with Vision-Based Tactile Sensing and Proprioception,” appears in the journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
