{"id":381740,"date":"2021-12-16T00:36:46","date_gmt":"2021-12-15T21:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/engineers-develop-a-robotic-hand-with-a-gecko-inspired-grip\/"},"modified":"2021-12-16T00:36:46","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T21:36:46","slug":"engineers-develop-a-robotic-hand-with-a-gecko-inspired-grip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/engineers-develop-a-robotic-hand-with-a-gecko-inspired-grip\/","title":{"rendered":"#Engineers develop a robotic hand with a gecko-inspired grip"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Engineers develop a robotic hand with a gecko-inspired grip<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\n A close-up of the hand performing a highly hyperextended pinch on only the top surface of an egg. Credit: Biomimetics and Dextrous Manipulation Lab
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Across a vast array of robotic hands and clamps, there is a common foe: The heirloom tomato. You may have seen a robotic gripper deftly pluck an egg or smoothly palm a basketball\u2014but, unlike human hands, one gripper is unlikely to be able to do both and a key challenge remains hidden in the middle ground.<\/p>\n

“You’ll see robotic hands do a power grasp and a precision grasp and then kind of imply that they can do everything in between,” said Wilson Ruotolo, a former graduate student in the Biomimetics and Dextrous Manipulation Lab at Stanford University. “What we wanted to address is how to create manipulators that are both dexterous and strong at the same time.”<\/p>\n

The result of this goal is “farmHand,” a robotic hand developed by engineers Ruotolo and Dane Brouwer, a graduate student in the Biomimetics and Dextrous Manipulation Lab, at Stanford (aka “the Farm”) and detailed in a paper published Dec. 15 in Science<\/a> Robotics<\/i>. In their testing, the researchers demonstrated that farmHand is capable of handling a wide variety of items, including raw eggs, bunches of grapes, plates, jugs of liquids, basketballs and even an angle grinder.<\/p>\n

FarmHand benefits from two kinds of biological inspiration. While the multi-jointed fingers are reminiscent of a human hand\u2014albeit a four-fingered one\u2014the fingers are topped with gecko-inspired adhesives. This grippy but not sticky material is based on the structure of gecko toes and has been developed over the last decade by the Biomimetics and Dextrous Manipulation Lab, led by Mark Cutkosky, the Fletcher Jones Professor in Stanford’s School of Engineering, who is also senior author of this research.<\/p>\n

Using the gecko-adhesive on a multi-fingered, anthropomorphic gripper for the first time was a challenge, which required special attention to the tendons controlling the fingers of farmHand and the design of the finger pads below the adhesive.<\/p>\n

From the farm to space and back again<\/b><\/p>\n

Like gecko’s toes, the gecko adhesive creates a strong hold via microscopic flaps. When in full contact with a surface, these flaps create a Van der Waals force\u2014a weak intermolecular force that results from subtle differences in the positions of electrons on the outsides of molecules. As a result, the adhesives can grip strongly but require little actual force to do so. Another bonus: They don’t feel sticky to the touch or leave a residue behind.<\/p>\n

“The first app<\/a>lications of the gecko adhesives had to do with climbing robots, climbing people or grasping very large, very smooth objects in space. But we’ve always had it in our minds to use them for more down-to-earth applications,” said Cutkosky. “The problem is that it turns out that gecko adhesives are actually very fussy.”<\/p>\n

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