October 25, 2010 | 3 It’s far from easy to design a robot with
one controllable joint, so imagine the difficulty of creating an
artificial hand and its numerous knuckles. A team of researchers
from the University of Chicago, Cornell University, iRobot Corp.
and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) may
have found a way around this challenge by devising a "universal
gripper". The device uses an amorphous rubber bag filled with
small particles that can mold and tighten around objects with
the help of vacuum pressure. Once the bag is pressed against an
object, the gripper contracts and then hardens when a weak
vacuum is applied. The bag-based gripper is more versatile than
a robotic hand, able to pick up items as small as M&M’s, the
researchers reported October 25 in Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Grappling problems occurred only
when the gripper’s bag could not extend far enough around an
object’s sides. (The objective was to study gripping objects as
opposed to manipula