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Sample Briefing
ROBOT GRIPPER EMPLOYS REACTIVE ALGORITHMS
Robot grippers offer wonderful remote manipulation of objects that has served
the manufacturing floor, but you wouldn't call them deft of touch:
"bumbling clods" would be the more likely description. Researchers at
New York University's (NYU) Courant Institute have developed a robot gripper
they describe as reactive. In other words, the gripper responds to stimuli from
its sensors the way a hand would from nerves and changes its grip to the
appropriate hold for a particular object.
This sounds similar to some other existing technologies, but there are some
big differences. For one, current gripper technology is often slow and prone to
error. Plus, you need to couple the gripper to some type of vision system, which
helps to slow the entire system down. And, oddly enough, the NYU gripper is
actually cheaper to produce.
In addition to the gripper itself, the system consists of two pairs of light
sources and sensors mounted on opposing extensions of each gripper. The light
sources and sensors serve to produce and detect any interruptions that occur to
a pair of parallel light beams and/or a pair of crossed light beams by the
object to be grasped.
The real trick to gripper is its reactive algorithm. By this, the inventors
of the technology, professors Bud Mishra and Marek Teichmann at NYU, mean an
algorithmic scheme in which a robot's sensors determine directly the actions of
the actuators. This is a departure from conventional robot task planning, in
which a model of the object to be manipulated is acquired from a number of
sensors, and an off-line geometric algorithm is employed to determine the
strategy for actuation. NYU's reactive robotics paradigm proposes a middle
ground, in which sensory input selectively determines the actions of the robot.
The actuators and sensors themselves are active components of the reactive
algorithm, resulting in a much smoother and faster operation.
The main applications for the reactive gripper would be in manufacturing as well
as in prosthetic hands. Prof. Mishra points out that the technology is capable
of being used just about anywhere someone wants to do very fast pick-and-place
tasks.
The technology was issued US Patent 5,541,485 in 1996. Currently, further
research on the technology is being funded by the National Science Foundation,
and Prof. Mishra is in the process of getting additional funding from DARPA. The
researchers are interested in partners and licensing opportunities.
As part of Mishra's DARPA proposal, he is planning to build 10,000 robots based
on the same principle as the reactive gripper and embed them in a sophisticated
software environment.
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