The article "This soft robotic gripper can screw in your light bulbs for you" introduces how in 2017, a team of engineers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) designed and built a soft robotic grip and its features. The soft robotic gripper can "pick up and manipulate objects without needing to see them and needing to be trained." It has three fingers made of pneumatic chambers with many degrees of freedom allowing manipulation of the held object. A smart sensing skin made of silicon rubber with embedded sensors made of conducting carbon nanotubes covers each of these three fingers. The sensing skin records and detects the nanotubes conductivity changes as the fingers bend. The data is then processed by the control board, which then creates a 3D model of the object the gripper is manipulating. There are similar grippers developed by the Distributed Robotics Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Iraq. However, the soft robotic has more practical applications.
The gripper at MIT has 3 fingers that estimate the outline of an object and identifies the object from a database. Our product stands out as it can create a 3D model of the object the gripper is touching. This is done by first mapping out the 2D outline. The sensors in the skin detect when the skin is in contact with the gripped object and the gripper rotates to get the outline of the gripped object. Our products' unique feature is that it creates the 3D model of the gripped object instead of matching it to an object in a database. This allows the flexibility of identifying unique and unusual objects. The soft robotic gripper can also pick up and manipulate objects. This gives it an edge over its competitors as it will have a wide range of potential applications. It has potential in the military, medical field, and the engineering world as a whole.
The soft robotic gripper developed at UCSD is similar to the soft robotic gripper developed by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Iraq. Yet, it edges out the competition with its computer modeling features. They both have 3 fingers each but the key difference is in the fingers. The gripper in Iraq uses pneumatic muscles that “form the actual fingers of the gripper as well as providing the force to power them”. This allows the gripper to “deform to its physical environment, for example, if inserted into a pipe”. The key differences are that their gripper can change its shape and size to fit into smaller environments whereas the gripper at UCSD can create a 3D model of the held object. The ability to create models have more practical uses as the issue of the gripper's fingers of being too large can be solved with a smaller sized gripper. The tradeoff of flexibility for 3D modeling is one that I easily chose. Having the ability to create 3D models allows it to have many more applications in research fields.
In conclusion, the soft robotic gripper would be an invaluable asset in the engineering industry as its potential is limitless. The applications of the soft robotic gripper are in situations that are volatile and require precision e.g. Surgeons & Chemists. Another potential application of the soft robotic gripper would be in Quality Control as the soft robotic gripper is able to feel any undesired features in the production line. With such unique features such as 3D modeling and object manipulation, the soft robotic gripper will be instrumental in the future of engineering.
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