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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

grippers

Soft Robotics Raises $10M to Add 3D Vision and AI to its Octopus-like Grippers

Soft Robotics, which is best known for making octopus-like grippers for robots, announced today that it has raised a $10 million extension to the $23 million Series B round it raised in January 2020. The round was co-led by Material Impact, Scale Venture Partners and Calibrate Ventures, and adds Tyson Ventures (the venture arm of Tyson Foods) to the syndicate. ABB Technology Ventures and Tekfen Ventures participated as well. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Soft Robotics to $58 million.

Soft Robotics uses rubber tipped grippers with “air actuated soft elastomeric end effectors” that mimic an octopus, allowing robotic arms to pick up odd-shaped and delicate items like eggs and bread without crushing them. The company says the new capital will help Soft Robotics launch its new SoftAI technology, which adds layers of 3D vision and artificial intelligence to its gripping solution.

According to Soft Robotics’ website, “SoftAI will evaluate the pick scene and automatically choose the best grasp and ideal robot trajectory to optimize rate and reduce product damage.” It’s easy to see how this type of automated discernment would come in handy for a company like Tyson Foods (which was already using Soft Robotics before it invested), which needs to pick up and pack all different types of animal products of varying shapes and sizes.

Chicken Wing and Poultry Automation with mGripAI

In addition to its new technology, Soft Robotics said its new funding will go towards commercial expansion to keep up with pandemic-driven demand. Last year COVID-19 exposed shortcomings in our food supply chain, with meatpacking facilities, which were already a dangerous place to work, becoming hot spots for the virus. Implementing robots in a meatpacking or other food-related factory can help add additional safety and social distancing to the work environment. Robotic arms can work all day without fatigue or injury, and placing robots on a line can help space out workers, so people aren’t working right next to each other.

During our first ArituclATE food conference back in 2019, a robotics researcher told me that robotic “grippers all suck.” But that appears to be changing. In addition to Soft Robotics’ octopus approach, new technologies based on origami (paper folding) and kirigami (paper cutting) are creating entirely new types of gripping technology that can be used for odd-shaped and delicate items. The combination of the pandemic and investor interest could help fuel accelerated development and implementation of this new gripper technology and unlock new areas and uses for robots in food production.

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.

This Robot's Soft Gripper Was Inspired By Japanese Kirigami

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).