Electroadhesive Grippers Make Anything Sticky
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 1 of November , 2010 at 1:43 am
Electroadhesion is pretty sweet. It’s sort of the fantasy method of gripping something, since you turn it on and it’ll stick to just about anything until you turn it off, and then it doesn’t. The surface that it’s sticking to doesn’t matter… It can be conductive, non-conductive, smooth, rough, and even covered in dirt. Unlike passive gripping systems (like claws or artificial gecko toes), electroadhesion does continuously consume power as long as it’s active, but 20 microwatts per newton of weight is pretty damn efficient. SRI International have applied this technology to robots that can climb walls, but they’re also turning it into a robotic gripper.
Like the “jamming” gripper we saw last week, an electroadhesive gripper can be thought of as universal, in that it doesn’t need complex sensors or programming to do its job: you just put the gripper in contact with an object, turn on the electroadhesion, and pick it up. The electroadhesive surface itself is thin and flexible, so as Travis suggests over on Hizook, it might be feasible to incorporate it directly into existing gripping systems to improve their current capabilities, and enable some new ones.
[ SRI Electroadhesion ] VIA [ Hizook ]
Comments (1)
Category: Research
- Add this post to
- Del.icio.us -
- Digg
Comment by Del
Made Monday, 1 of November , 2010 at 11:38 am
They say one of the potential applications is “Toys/hobby robots”, which makes me wonder what would happen to credit cards if junior pilots his electroadhesive bot over mom’s purse (which is always just tossed in some random place).
I envision a wall/ceiling crawling bot to whack the spiders that hang out in my vaulted ceilings.
Electroadhesion + Evolution Robotics’ Mint = hard-to-reach cobweb removal (also related to stupid vaulted ceilings).
I want one.
