Dextrous Robotics Believes Chopsticks Are the Key to Robot Manipulation
Designed for the logistics industry, this small desk-mounted robot precedes a large autonomous gantry system.
A robotics startup, Dextrous Robotics, has come up with a novel way to get robot arms to grip things for manipulation — inspired by chopsticks.
"We can pick up basically anything using chopsticks," company co-founder Evan Drumwrite explains in an interview with IEEE Spectrum. "If you're good with chopsticks, you can pick up individual grains of rice, and you can pick up things that are relatively large compared to the scale of the chopsticks. Your imagination is about the limit, so wouldn't it be cool if you had a robot that could manipulate things with chopsticks?"
That's exactly what Dextrous is building: Robots which use a pair of oversized chopsticks with five degrees of freedom to manipulate objects, starting with boxes to be unloaded from or loaded into trucks.
To prove the concept, the company has modified an off-the-shelf robotic arm — Pomo Robotics' Franka Panda — with its chopstick-inspired gripper. Its vision, though, is bigger: The creation of opposing tower-style vertical gantry robots, which can move around a warehouse to speed up loading and unloading.
The company's approach may be novel, but it's far from the only company looking to the same market. Earlier this year Boston Dynamics — now owned by Hyundai Motor Group — showcased an omnidirectional robot dubbed Stretch, while Pickle's Dill is being promoted on the promise of augmenting human warehouse staff rather than replacing them.
More details on the company's designs can be found on the official website, and in the IEEE interview.