FESTO BIONIC HANDLING ASSISTANT

That elephant trunk robot arm thing from Festo that we spotted back in April has been fleshed out a bit, and if you ever wondered which robotic arm has the most practice handling giant eggs, well, you won’t after watching the video. I imagine that part of the reason that they chose eggs is to highlight how safe the arm is: since it’s not made of metal and uses air pressure instead of geared motors as its actuation system, you’re much less likely to get your skull fractured by a rogue movement.

Unfortunately, the downside of using air pressure (besides the inevitable complexity of the valve system) is that precision movement becomes quite difficult. Festo probably leads the field when it comes to fine manipulation with air powered muscles, but still, you can see from the video that the arm isn’t that great at precise tasks. One solution (that some other groups are looking into) is to combine air muscles for macro scale movement with a wrist and gripper powered by conventional servos. That way, you’d get the best of both worlds, at the expense of, well, expense… But hey, nobody said robots are cheap. And they’re most definitely not.

[ Festo Bionic Handling Assistant ]