The robot jammer is a gripper mechanism made of a rubber balloon filled with coffee. The grounds move around each other like grains of sand and can conform to objects and complex surfaces, but when air is pumped out of the balloon, the grounds all "jam" together into a solid mass, yielding a strong hold on whatever the gripper is in contact with. It's simple, it's cheap, and you can pick up just about anything without having to calculate optimal grasping points or do anything else in the way of sensing or computation: To operate, position the gripper against an object, pump the air out, and a suitable grip remains.
Now robotocists at Cornell University's Creative Machines Lab have found that if they rapidly fill the balloon with air, they can use the jammer device to throw the objects in the gripper. It sounds simple enough, but what you might not expect is the repeatable long-range accuracy, good enough to shoot baskets, sort hardware, and even play a game of darts.
The researchers say that the precision they can achieve is ±60 mm with 95 percent confidence in the direction perpendicular to flight, which "is certainly too coarse for high-precision manufacturing tasks but could be useful for tasks like sorting objects into bins in a factory or throwing away trash in a home."
In the video below is a demonstration of the new shooting capabilities of a universal jamming gripper that also utilizes positive pressure.
This research is a collaboration between our lab at Cornell and the lab of Heinrich Jaeger at the University of Chicago.
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