Festo‘s always making cool stuff, and they’ve just posted some video highlights from back in 2007, including their Airfish and Airacuda, and (most of) a humanoid. Nothing new here, but still pretty cool to watch.

[ Festo ]

That elephant trunk robot arm thing from Festo that we spotted back in April has been fleshed out a bit, and if you ever wondered which robotic arm has the most practice handling giant eggs, well, you won’t after watching the video. I imagine that part of the reason that they chose eggs is to highlight how safe the arm is: since it’s not made of metal and uses air pressure instead of geared motors as its actuation system, you’re much less likely to get your skull fractured by a rogue movement.

Unfortunately, the downside of using air pressure (besides the inevitable complexity of the valve system) is that precision movement becomes quite difficult. Festo probably leads the field when it comes to fine manipulation with air powered muscles, but still, you can see from the video that the arm isn’t that great at precise tasks. One solution (that some other groups are looking into) is to combine air muscles for macro scale movement with a wrist and gripper powered by conventional servos. That way, you’d get the best of both worlds, at the expense of, well, expense… But hey, nobody said robots are cheap. And they’re most definitely not.

[ Festo Bionic Handling Assistant ]

On Tuesday we posted a concept animation from Festo of something that looked like a tentacle robot. I commented that I hoped we’d see a prototype or something soon, but it turns out that the robot is fully armed (tentacled?) and operational and it’s not a tentacle but rather a manipulator arm based on an elephant’s trunk:

I especially liked the design of the grabber itself; notice how the structure passively grips around a spherical object when pressure is applied. The cyber kite is pretty cool too, we wrote about that back in December. This video is a 2010 highlight reel of Festo’s Bionic Learning Network projects… They did the same thing last year, featuring their incredibly awesome robot penguins.

[ Festo Bionics ]

I don’t read German, but it looks like this concept from Festo for a robotic tentacle arm is fairly straightforward and well in line with the sorts of things that they’ve got experience with. The tentacle arm is actuated using air power instead of servos; by using air pressure to expand chambers in the arm it can be made to move in any direction. It looks like the hand is a little more complicated, relying on the addition of a few piston driven actuators for finer control. There’s not much more information on this design yet, but I’m crossing my tentacles that we’ll see a real prototype sometime soon.

[ Festo ]

“Controlling the forces of nature has been a dream of humankind since time immemorial. With the CyberKite, Festo is meeting this challenge as part of the Bionic Learning Network and is developing a kite system with a cybernetic control unit.”

Why? Because robot penguin, that’s why!

But seriously, I have no idea, besides that it’s an interesting project to tackle… Although come to think of it, I suppose it could have some commercial applications, too.

[ Festo ]