Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Soft Robotics

Soft Robotics Wants To Give Your Food Robot Good Eye-Hand Coordination

Football wide receivers that can catch the ball well are said to have soft hands. Food robots who use too much force grabbing delicate produce are, well, just being robots.

But now, robot system designers can turn their food robot into a veggie-shuffling Jerry Rice with the new mGrip “hand” from Soft Robotics.

The mGrip is part of a new SoftAI product suite from Soft Robotics that robot designers can add to existing systems to optimize them for handling food like meat and produce in high-volume environments. In addition to a food-grabbing hand, the SoftAI suite includes a “perception module” that pairs cameras with machine vision software that the company says will add “eye-hand coordination” to industrial robots. The on-board processing of the perception module uses machine learning to understand how to categorize and segment different types of food.

Robotics has long been used for tasks like packing food, but only in highly structured environments. Often, this meant using humans as part of the process to do things like sorting. However, advances in machine vision over the past couple of years have meant machines can essentially replace the need for humans to do some of the tasks they’ve been needed for in the past. With an off-the-shelf product like SoftAI, what companies like Amazon have probably spent millions to build now becomes more turnkey.

Beyond high-volume warehousing applications, I can also see how a platform like SoftAI could be used in more consumer-facing food robotic systems. For example, first-generation robotic food kiosks often used off-the-shelf robotic arms that required lots of customization to make them work. With new food-optimized plug-in hardware like SoftAI, small teams could accelerate their time to market and dedicate their time to other engineering problems.

You can see the mGrip and the SoftAI perception module in the video below.

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.

Soft Robotics Raises $23M Series B for its Gripping Tech

Soft Robotics, which makes grippers for robots so they can handle odd-shaped and delicate items like food, announced today that it has raised a $23 million Series B round of funding. The round was co-led by Calibrate Ventures and Material Impact and includes existing investors Honeywell, Hyperplane, Scale, Tekfen Ventures, and Yamaha.

Also participating in the round was industrial automation solutions provider, FANUC, which had previously formed a strategic partnership with Soft Robotics to integrate the startup’s mGrip gripper system with any FANUC robot through the release of a new controller.

This brings the total amount of funding raised by Soft Robotics to $48 million.

As we wrote in 2018, Soft Robotics’ gripping solution for picking up objects mimics an octopus, using rubbery-tipped appendages. In the company’s demo video below, you can see the one gripper picking up all different kinds of items with odd shapes and textures like a loaf of bread, individual cookies, an onion and a package of chicken.

There are two reasons to pay attention to this technology. First, grocery stores like Walmart, Kroger and Albertsons are all starting to implement more robotic fulfillment centers. The ability to pick up fresh and delicate items will expand a retailer’s ability to automate fulfillment of online grocery orders. In addition to the CPGs, robots could be used to pack more fresh items like donuts, baguettes or store made bags of soup.

Second, as we’ve seen from Sony and Nvidia, the ability for a robot to safely manipulate fragile and odd-shaped objects like eggs and bananas can translate into other sectors of automation like medicine that require a gentle touch.

In today’s press announcement, Soft Robotics said it will use the new funding for its next stage of growth.

Soft Robotics Gets a Firm Grip on $20 Million

Soft Robotics has raised $20 million to expand the use of its “air actuated soft elastomeric end effectors.” Put another way--the company just raised a bunch of money for its rubbery robot parts that can gently handle delicate items such as eggs and fruit without crushing them.

Robots, as we’ve written before, are great for manual, repetitive tasks, but traditional systems like suction cups or metal grippers have never been great at handling irregularly shaped or soft items. To accomplish that, Soft Robotics uses material science to mimic an octopus (see the TED video below for a full explainer), and the result is an attachment of rubbery-tipped appendages that can be added to existing industrial systems and used to pick, manipulate and sort all manner of items.

According to the company’s product page, Soft Robotics offers three different configurations of its attachment, each meant to handle different types of food ranging from apples to pastries to hamburger patties.

Using robots for picking, sorting and otherwise handling of food would mean faster, more consistent results that could happen twenty-four hours a day. Soft Robotics SuperPick bin-picking system, for example, can execute more than 600 picks in an hour.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Soft Robotics is going to use the new money to push further into the food and beverage sector. It’s not hard to instantly see where this technology could be beneficial throughout the food stack.

In agriculture, Soft Robotics’ grippers could be used for picking fruits without smushing them. In the produce supply chain, a soft touch would come in handy for gentle sorting and shipping. And restaurants like Zume and CaliBurger could most likely find use for a robot that could handle dough and tomatoes (and keep up with the other robots already in use there).

Soft Robotics has more than 100 customers and told the Journal that it had revenues of “less than $10 million” last year (though that was an 80 percent jump over the previous year). This is the second round of funding for the Cambridge, MA company, which had previously raised $5 million. This latest infusion was led by Hyperlane Venture Capital and includes Scale Venture Partners as well as the VC group at Honywell International.

With this new money, Soft Robotics will undoubtedly make their grippers even more robust, but it will be hard to top this video of them in use packing donuts.