Walk into a modern warehouse and chances are good you'll see at least one robot handling inventory, but it won't be picking fruit.
That's not necessarily because robots can't identify a juicy orange or a ripe pear, but rather because their metal hands might squish them, a problem that researchers from the US and Europe are now trying to solve.
Their first target is a grocery warehouse in New Hampshire, which is playing host to a prototype robot that can mimic human hands using a gripper powered by variable air pressure, the BBC reports. The brainchild of a collaboration between Disney subsidiary Soma and researchers from five European universities, the Ocado robot can pick up pretty much anything that requires special handling care, from fruit to wine bottles.
Blog posts from Ocado and the Technical University of Berlin, one of the robot's developers, explain how it works: the robot's hands are mounted on a flexible scaffold and equipped with pressure sensors that can identify "soft, deformable structures." Using pneumatic valves, the hands adjust to cradle—but not crush—objects with a wide variety of shapes.
Ocado explains that "the robotic hand is highly under-actuated: only the air pressure is controlled, while the fingers, palm, and thumb adjust their shape to the given object geometry."
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So far, the bot has successfully picked up synthetic fruit from a standardized grocery shipping container. The team hopes to move on to real fruit in the near future, and eventually wants the soft-handed robot to assemble an entire online grocery order with no human intervention.
Meanwhile, a San Francisco coffee shop already has a robot that can deliver cups of joe to its customers. Called Cafe X, it uses a robotic arm similar to Ocado's, which prepares drinks and moves them from the waiting station to the window for pickup.
You might say that Cafe X has an easier challenge than Ocado—after all, paper coffee cups are identical in shape and fairly sturdy. However, the consequences of spilling piping-hot coffee in front of a line of customers are much worse than accidentally squashing a pear in a warehouse.