Robot gripper looks like a wilted flower, but can lift 100 times its weight
This is pretty neat! I think we are so predisposed to assume that grasping and lifting things should look a certain way based on our own anatomy.The big questions that come to mind are resilience or I guess you could call it MTBF, and also hygiene.A human hand knows when a thing it picks up has gotten it dirty and can change a glove or go wash. This design in particular looks like it would hang on to particles from things it’s picked up (thinking like bits of broccoli, but also on the microscopic level) and be very difficult to clean with all that surface area.I think for picking groceries you would almost have to dedicate one arm for each SKU placing items into bags that were ferried by, you could not have one arm with a bag moving between SKUs and filling that bag.I fully expect to see lights out grocery stores in the near future, I’m a bit surprised no one has tried it yet. Maybe the last mile delivery still dominates the cost too much.