Industrial Robotics – Empire Robotics 'gets a grip
January 14, 2014
Empire Robotics, a startup formed by two Cornell University grad students in 2010, has entered production of its unique robot gripper, the Versaball. The gripper uses simple vacuum packing technology to force granular particles inside an enclosure to interlock when vacuum is applied. Think how hard a vacuum-packed container of coffee grounds is, until you open it and break the vacuum. The gripper, whose early prototypes had coffee grounds inside a balloon, uses that simple analogy to conform to an object’s shape with no vacuum, then grip tightly when vacuum is applied.
