Coffee Makes Robots Powerful

Did you know that coffee helps robots become a more powerful machine? Because robots don’t drink, they use coffee for something else—to help them lift, hold and move objects.

Robots are modeled after human beings. And like humans, robots also have hands with fingers and thumbs. These robots might be programmed to use their hands as humans do: to lift and hold objects.

But the new tool, called the “universal gripper,” suggests robots don’t need fingers to move things around. It’s a simple device made of a small balloon filled with ground coffee and attached to a vacuum. This strange but smart design means the robot gripper can pick up all kinds of objects, including fragile things.

“One of the tricky things about picking up delicate objects is that you have to know how much pressure to apply: too little and you drop the object; too much and you break it,” Peko Hosoi told Science News. “This new gripper works by exactly conforming to the shape of the object.”

In a video produced by the scientists, the robotic tool is shown lifting all kinds of objects, including a jack, an egg and a shock absorber. The video also shows that the tool allows a robot to write with a pen or pour water from one glass into another.

“Our goal was to pick up objects where you don’t know what you’re dealing with ahead of time,” Eric Brown told Science News. Brown is a scientist at the University of Chicago who worked on the new tool.

The new tool is small, but the scientists are thinking big. They say that a giant gripper three feet across would be strong enough to lift and move something weighing 2,000 pounds — like a small car.

Of course, to get enough grounds to fill such a big balloon, the scientists would need a lot of coffee.

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