[sudo-discuss] universal robot gripper

[Jake]

so the other night, we made a universal robot gripper using coffee* and a 
birthday balloon, and the top of a shampoo bottle, and some other stuff.

search google for "universal robot gripper" and you'll see what i mean.

here are pictures:
http://spaz.org/~jake/robot/gripper/

it works decently well, as you can see.. but it could use improvement.  I 
am going to try to add a blower to inflate the balloon a little bit when 
it's trying to grab something.

of course we will put this on the end of the robot arm, so it can pick 
stuff up.

I think we should try again with a larger balloon.. and thicker wouldn't 
hurt.

So if you have a few balloons laying around, preferably thick-skinned and 
larger than a tennisball when deflated, please bring them to the robot. 
you can put them on top of the control box, or the robot itself, if i'm 
not around.

Also, if you have a coffee grinder (or know of one at sudoroom) i'd like 
to use it to grind some coffee more finely than we did with my little 
one.. when it's not finely ground enough, it's hard for it to re-shape to 
grab stuff.

i'm going to try to use one of those motorized mattress inflators as a 
pump, but if you have something like that that you think would work, bring 
it.  Especially if it runs off of 120VAC (plugs into the wall) and is not 
crazy loud.

-jake

* only decaf coffee was used for this experiment