Summary Draft - Soft Robotic Gripper

The article “This Soft Robotic Gripper Can Screw in Your Light Bulbs for You” introduces a revolutionary robotic arm and its features. Designed and built by the engineering team from the University of California San Diego, the robotic gripper is capable but not limited to controlling the object it is handling. According to Michael T. Trolley, it is designed to emulate a biological hand. One of the main features was the ability to manipulate and model objects. Consisting of three fingers, each has a total of “three soft flexible pneumatic chambers”, making manipulation possible. The article also states that each of the fingers is covered with a “smart, sensing skin” embedded with “conducting nanotube” sensors which reacts to the change of conductivity caused by the flexing of fingers, effectively generating data of the object it holds. The data generated is then passed to a control board where the modelling of the object is done like a CT scan.