IITians make multimodal robotic system

The robot named the ‘GraspMan,’ consists of a pair of graspers which provides morphological adaptation, enabling it to conform to the geometry of the object being grasped.

Two such graspers, equipped with the robotic platform provides behavioural adaptation, which is the capability to change the locomotion behaviour to adapt to the environment.

A prototype of the grasper has been fabricated at the Robotics Laboratory, Department of Engineering Design, IIT Madras, and the experimental results confirm manipulation capabilities of the robot. Explaining about the device, Asokan Thondiyath from the Robotics Laboratory, Department of Engineering Design, IIT Madras said that the robot with a minimalistic design that can overcome the need for task-specific robots that are capable of navigating and manipulating across different environments without increasing the system complexity. According to him, this new class of robot developed by the IIT-M team has various industrial applications such as pipe climbing and inspection, which involves climbing, holding and assembling, all of which are possible in their design.