Cornell University

John R Amend, Jr

Hod Lipson

Heinrich Jaeger

Eric Brown

Yun Jiang

Ashutosh Saxena

Stephen Moseson

A dexterous robotic apparatus includes an asymmetrical hand mechanism including only two finger components: a first independent finger and a second independent finger, and a respective first finger motor and a respective second finger motor disposed in the hand mechanism, wherein the hand mechanism is characterized by only two continuous degrees of freedom.

Robotic apparatus, method, and applications

A passive universal gripper includes a mass of granular material encased in an elastic membrane. Using a combination of positive and negative pressure, the gripper can rapidly grip and release a wide range of objects that are typically challenging for conventional universal grippers, such as flat objects, soft objects, or objects with complex geometries. The gripper passively conforms to the shape of a target object, then vacuum-hardens to grip it rigidly; later using positive pressure to reverse this transition&#x2014;releasing the object and returning to a deformable state. The apparatus and method enable the fast ejection of objects from the gripper, as well as essentially instantaneous reset time between releasing and gripping.

Gripping and releasing apparatus and method

Given an image and an aligned depth map of an object, the invention predicts the 3D location, 3D orientation and opening width or area of contact for an end of arm tooling (EOAT) without requiring a physical model.

Growing community of inventors

Ithaca, NY, United States of America

John R Amend, Jr