Researchers at Harvard have come up with a set of robotic hands that can pick up fragile specimens from the ocean floor for marine biologists to observe — all without the danger of breaking the objects they're attempting to recover. And they're very, very squishy.

Created by scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, the impetus for the robotic fingers — referred to as "soft grippers" — came from prior heavy-duty marine recovery designs, which more or less worked as an equivalent of man-handling ancient artifacts in a museum.

"They were using rigid Jaws of Life-type grippers designed for the oil and gas industry that were totally overpowered and were destroying things," said roboticist and Harvard's Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences Robert J. Wood, who is also based at the Wyss Institute. "It immediately clicked that there was a soft robotics solution that may be viable."

In response, Wood and his colleagues immediately went to work on executing a recovery robot made out of gentler materials, with more agility and dexterity than previous iterations, and testing it out in areas and ecosystems like those at the Sea of Eilat in Israel, where the specimens they were working toward successfully catching were plentiful, as well as testing on coral reefs.

What resulted was a soft gripper made with "a new fabrication technique that allows for the rapid creation of soft actuators," according to a statement released by the university. Their efforts were described in a paper published Jan. 20 in the journal Soft Robotics. The two types of hands that will replace the metal gripper on underwater submersibles can recover objects of different sizes and shapes. One is inspired by the coiling action of a boa constrictor and can access tight spaces and clutch small and irregular shaped objects, they note, while the other is a bellows-style model that features opposing pairs of bending actuators.

The team hopes that the robotic fingers will have a bigger use than just picking up seashells from the ocean floor: it also envisions using the device to properly surveil and interact with actual marine life without the possibility of marring the data from the "stress" brought on by taking a subject out of its native environment. They may also help in underwater archaeology.

Check out the soft robotic grippers in the video below.

 

Source: Harvard | Wyss Institute