Tesla’s Optimus may be years away, but Toyota Research Institute’s Punyo soft robot is here now and ready to help around the house. Thanks to its soft arms made from air-filled bladders, it’s not afraid to make a lot of contact, utilizing its whole body to carry and manipulate more than it could by grasping with only outstretched hands.
The air-filled bladders, also known as ‘bubbles’, is connected via a tube to a pressure sensor which senses forces applied to the outer surfaces of the bubbles. There are 13 bubbles on each arm and they can be individually pressurized to a desired stiffness, adding approximately 5 cm of compliance to the surface of the robot arms.
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For core whole-body manipulation tasks, such as grasping and lifting, we’ve broken these skills down into synergies, similar to synergies for hand-based grasping, which are motions we individually control via a gamepad interface,” said the Toyota Research Institute.
