Did you know that the same forces that generate static electricity can be strong enough to pick up and move boxes, crates, and other objects? A robot startup named GrabIt is making mechanical “hands” that use electrostatic attraction to gently pick up and transport objects. Powered electrodes, either on the surface of the gripper or on flexible, tentacle-like fingers, generate and maintain powerful attractive forces between nearly any object. In demos, the company has shown its grippers can pick up everything from cans and fruits to iPads, boxes, crates, and sheets of glass, silicon, or fabric.
Grippers are the business end of robots: without them, machines wouldn’t be able to pick up or manipulate objects. But it’s not easy to pick things up: many robots rely on mechanical movements or vacuum suction, both of which are big, expensive, and power hungry. More importantly, they can be less flexible than grippers that use electrostatic attraction — often they need to be reconfigured to pick up particular objects. And they can struggle to pick up fragile objects like sheets of glass. GrabIt says it’s overcome that issue with its powered electrodes — they evenly distribute force across a large surface area. And the technology’s not just for robot hands. One of the more promising ideas is to build the electrodes into conveyer belts to help sort objects or allow for steeper inclines on manufacturing belts.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
