Video: Elephant-Trunk-Inspired Robot Arm Grabs With Sensitivity

By Clay Dillow Posted 11.23.2010 at 5:35 pm 12 Comments

The Bionic Handling Assistant Festo

Germany’s Festo is no stranger to robots that mimic animal biology, but its new elephant trunk-inspired robot arm is more concerned with the fragility of human physiology than the strength of the elephant. The arm – known as the Bionic Handling Assistant – is certainly strong and flexible like the appendage it’s modeled after, but it’s also safe for humans to work with, employing a battery of resistance sensors that make human-machine interaction less of a safety hazard.

Safety fears have been a major obstacle keeping the personal robotics revolution from fully blooming, as it can be dangerous for humans to work alongside large, strong robots that could potentially injure them. After all, robots don’t know pain and have trouble assessing dangerous situations in which their actions might harm a human being. In industrial settings, this often keeps robots cordoned off in their own spaces where they can’t accidentally hurt someone.

So Festo set out to create an arm that is both strong and dexterous as well as safe for humans working alongside it. Using 3-D printing technology, the engineers (and their partners at the Fraunhofer Institute) created lightweight and soft trunk segments that are powered by pneumatic artificial muscles that drive some serious force underneath. The trunk segments are littered with resistance sensors that help it to be aware of contact with people and objects around it. A three-fingered gripper at the end is also designed to need little force to grasp a range of objects.

The result is a multifunctional gripper ‘bot that could be applied to a range of industrial applications, as an extra set of hands on the lab bench, or even as an assistant in the operating room. And since it can interact with other Bionic Handling Assistants to pass objects back and forth, multiple robo-trunks could be deployed in arrays that assist both humans and each other. No word from Festo on whether it will work for peanuts.

[New Scientist]

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12 Comments

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johnt007871

11/23/10 at 5:50 pm

Look more like octopus arms to me... like the kind you get fused to your spine.

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StephenD.Alverez

11/23/10 at 7:21 pm

Designed to interact with humans in a safe way, huh? Tell me if that's still stands true when you have an evil Doctor Octopus impersonator who runs a muck in Time Square!

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lbln31

11/23/10 at 7:35 pm

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( http://www.shoppinglove.org)
sdfwerwer

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Dirk Mcbratney

11/23/10 at 8:20 pm

I know, right? It's the most nonthreatening robot appendage in the world in practical terms, and yet it looks for all the world exactly like the tentacles on Matrix's Sentinels.

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Domek

11/23/10 at 9:05 pm

I saw this arm in action in "Wallace And Gromets World Of Invention". German engineers once more prove ingenious. I wonder - the tips of those "fingers", is there where pressure sensors are ? Amazing.

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sxc43

11/24/10 at 12:54 am

maybe you can find answers here:

you can find many cheap and fashion stuff

=== http://www.supershops.org ===

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johnt007871

11/24/10 at 10:23 am

So how about requiring posts with the words "shopping" "buy" "paypal" "ebay" "fashion" etc to require approval before being posted? Just a thought.

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Varsity

11/24/10 at 2:06 pm

@johnt007871
I don't know if that will work.. These china-spammers lack grammar and spelling making it difficult to understand them at all. Example: "good news there's fashionable". They sound challenged and completely illiterate dispite Microsoft word assisting their grammar and spelling.

As for the tech.. Interesting step forward. Looks like we could implement these with a camera inside the claw like the mouth of an octopus to automate difficult component assembly and build factories independent of China in the USA. Here's to economic independence through tech advancements!

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10jacobf

11/24/10 at 5:15 pm

@Varsity

I only started seeing these horrible spam ads in recent months. I assumed that PopSci knew about it and would take them down quickly. Seems that they don't. Now I can hardly go through any article without seeing one

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ekisom

11/24/10 at 10:37 pm

ok, we'll soon need spiderman for where that thing ends up. connected to doc octopus' spine

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thegunslinger007

11/25/10 at 4:43 pm

@McBratney: I was thinking the same thing, squiddy arm. The rise of the machines begins!

@TheRest: Just ignore the spammers guys, PopSci obviously is...

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Brian H

11/25/10 at 7:16 pm

Combine with the coffee grounds gripper! That I'd like to see ...

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