Part of the flexibility of the human hand’s potential to select up nearly something comes from having the ability to apply a delicate contact for frail or oddly-shaped objects. That’s one thing robots battle with, notably when functioning autonomously, and sadly the answer might lie with an unorthodox gripper design that looks straight out of a horror movie.

It appears becoming that researchers from Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences ought to reveal their new gripper design so near Halloween because it takes inspiration from weird sea creatures like octopi and jellyfish that depend on teams of lengthy tentacles and filaments to ensnare and reel in prey for consumption. The large squid has lengthy been a mysterious creature of ocean lore, so why not recreate one in a lab setting?

Taking inspiration from animals to construct robots designed to perform a particular activity is way from a brand new thought. The human hand is perhaps extremely dextrous, but it surely’s additionally extremely arduous to duplicate its skills for a robotic. Tentacles, then again, are usually not, and it’s their simplicity that’s the important thing to how this gripper design works.

The synthetic tentacles are made out of foot-long hole rubber tubes with one aspect being barely thicker than the opposite. When empty, they turn into limp and seemingly lifeless, hanging like straight hair, however when pumped filled with air, they turn into pressurized and curl up like a pigtail. The curling motion is kind of fully random, so for those who have been to place an object subsequent to one of many tentacles because it curled up beneath stress, there’s an opportunity it would wrap round it, and an opportunity it received’t. But place an object subsequent to a big group of those tentacles, and it’s all however assured that no less than a number of of them are going to wind across the object as they curl, and one another, and the extra of those entanglements that happen, the stronger the grip turns into.

Collectively the group of tentacles gives a robust maintain on an object, however individually, every tentacle has a comparatively weak grip that means there’s little danger of a fragile object being broken within the course of. And as a result of the tentacles solely present a safe maintain once they’re pumped filled with air, merely releasing that stress may also launch what’s being held.

Tested utilizing each real-world experiments with the prototype in addition to simulations, the researchers consider the brand new gripper design may very well be an efficient different to what’s used immediately for dealing with every thing from vegetation, to fruit and veggies, to even delicate glassware. However, the design nonetheless comes with some points that can should be addressed earlier than one thing like this exhibits up in factories or warehouses. The random nature of the entanglements signifies that objects which have been picked up can’t be put again down with the identical quantity of precision and accuracy because the vacuum grippers which can be used to deal with delicate objects immediately, which poses a giant problem for automated duties like packaging, or prepping an element for the following stage in an automatic meeting line.