Duke's Cartesian Hand: a $500 3D-printed gripper that opens caps and drives screws
The Cartesian Hand: In-Hand Manipulation with All-Linear Fingers
Duke researchers built a 7-DoF end-effector that uses only linear motion to combine grasping and in-hand manipulation. Two parallel grippers hold different parts of an object while four sliding fingertips move them relative to each other. The 850-gram, $500 hand handles 35 objects across lab, manufacturing, and household settings, performing tasks like pipetting, screwdriving, and trigger actuation, and transfers from a robot arm to a humanoid.
These results show that versatile in-hand manipulation capability can emerge from a mechanically simple architecture when independent grasping and relative motion are designed directly into the end-effector.
- Animats
It works best on problems which are strongly Cartesian. The chopsticks demo shows the limitations of this. The gripper can pick up two chopsticks, but it can't do much with them, because it can't rotate them to bring them together at the points.
But it seems to be good for lab equipment with simple geometry.
Also, where are the motors? Inside the gripper, or at the other end of cables?
- chuckledog
Reminds me a bit of the TARS robot from Interstellar. It was portrayed as a highly capable robot with limited articulation. (CASE too) https://interstellarfilm.fandom.com/wiki/Robot
- octoberfranklin
One of the challenging parts of imitating human hands is that our hands sense through the same surface which deforms as we bend our fingers. We don't have good robotic devices that can do that.
This sidesteps the problem: the surface that contacts the object is flat and never bends, so you can apply a huge variety of very detailed grid sensors to it.
The "rolling between the fingers" trick is ultimately what eliminates the need for deformation.