The notion of a large metallic robot that speaks in monotone and moves in lumbering, deliberate steps is somewhat hard to shake. But practitioners in the field of soft robotics have an entirely different image in mind—autonomous devices composed of compliant parts that are gentle to the touch, more closely resembling human fingers than R2-D2 or Robby the Robot.
That model is now being pursued by Professor Edward Adelson and his Perceptual Science Group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). In a recent project, Adelson and Sandra Liu—a mechanical engineering Ph.D. student at CSAIL—have developed a robotic gripper using novel “GelSight Fin Ray” fingers that, like the human hand, is supple enough to manipulate objects. What sets this work apart from other efforts in the field is that Liu and Adelson have endowed their gripper with touch sensors that can meet or exceed the sensitivity of human skin.
Their work was presented last week at the 2022 IEEE 5th International Conference on Soft Robotics.
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