Boston University Researchers Develop Kirigami-Based Gripper for Robots

Researchers at Boston University (BU) have developed a new type of versatile robotic gripper inspired by the Japanese art of kirigami, or paper cutting. In a paper released earlier this month, Douglas Holmes, BU College of Engineering associate professor of mechanical engineering and BU PhD student Yi Yang demonstrated how their new type of flexible gripper can pick up a wide variety of objects including soft, perishable items like raspberries.

As shown in this video below, the new soft gripper is made by laser cutting a specific “shell” shapes out of flexible material. When the shell is placed over an object and both ends are pulled at the same time, the shell contracts, tightening around the object enough to pick it up, but not so hard that the object breaks. In the video you can see the gripper pick up a raspberry, a grain of sand and even rows of marbles.

It’s not too hard to imagine different applications for this soft gripper technology in the food world. It could be used for harvesting berries, industrial packaging of food like eggs, or for picking and packing grocery items at an automated fulfillment center.

Food is often a good use case for robotics since it is oddly shaped and can be quite fragile. If a robot can manipulate berries or eggs or bread without breaking or squishing them, then that robo-dexterity can be transferred to other operations involving delicate materials.

There are actually a number of researchers and startups working to bring this level of precision to robotic grippers. Dexterity Robots can figure out how much pressure to apply to an object when picking it up to avoid smushing it. The aptly named Soft Robotics grippers use rubbery-tipped appendage and mimic an octopus to gently pick up objects. And a couple years back MIT researchers turned to origami, another traditional Japanese paper art form, to develop a cone-shaped gripper that acted similar to a Venus flytrap.

For those interested in learning more about Boston University’s kirigami-inspired robot, the full research paper can be found at Science Robotics (subscription required).

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