STTR Phase I: Versatile Robot Hands for Warehouse Automation

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is clear from the size of the market in warehousing and logistics. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the annual cost of moving inventory by hand in warehouses is 5 billion dollars. Industry is eager to adopt new robotic technology, and it has already made a significant impact in many aspects of this problem, speeding shipments and lowering costs. However, handling individual items has not yet proven viable when the range of objects is large. The grasping robot developed in this project will meet this need, and reduce the cost of logistics for manufacturers, distributors, and customers. Additionally, the creation of robot grasping systems that can automatically grasp a wide range of objects will open up the benefits of robotic technology to workers in other industries. This is critical to making robots accessible to small manufacturing shops, and will significantly improve the performance of telepresence systems used for military, rescue, and consumer applications such as home assistance for the elderly. This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase I project is based on a decade of university research on the design and construction of robots for grasping using passive mechanisms. Through the carefully tuned structural compliance of the fingers, robot hands can be designed to compensate for variation in the size, shape and location of grasped objects to obtain reliable grasps. During the course of this project, a commercial product will be developed capable of picking and placing a wide range of items at extremely low error rates, something that has hitherto been considered a hard problem in sensing and planning. The new compliant grippers, combined with breakthroughs in low-cost tactile sensing and simplified grasp planning, will enable a level of performance that meets the needs of real-world customers. The new picking robot will be validated against a set of realistic items picked from bins in a simulated warehouse environment.