Aiming at increasing the competitiveness of the European industry, the project will give robotic manipulation one of the key abilities still missing: universality, i.e. to manipulate objects as diverse as textiles for garments; soft packaged food incl. liquids; technical textiles for the manufacturing of large structural composite parts…
Those materials do not behave in an entirely predictable way, due to their high flexibility, and can be easily damaged. Grasping and manipulating them requires a gentle grasp, fine and adaptive control of movements that is beyond the current state of the art in robotics.
MERGING will contribute to the development of a new low-cost dexterous gripper taking advantage of an electro-adhesive skin, in order to show enhanced gripping performances, while reducing the gripping forces, thus avoiding damaging the soft objects. The project will also propose control schemes including AI, to adapt the system’s response to the high variability of the object behaviour, and to make the human-robot collaboration and robot programing more intuitive.
Learn more about MERGING : http://www.merging-project.eu/