A team of Student Engineers have grabbed first place at The Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition in Vancouver.
The competition – organised by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society – asks competitors to carry out 10 challenges. From pouring water to hammering nails, each team must tackle a series of tasks within 2 hours to score points.
The tasks are set before the competition to allow each team to develop a strategy; each team then has two days on site to re-construct their machine and tailor it to the challenge.
The Cambridge team was made up of Cambridge PhD student Josie Hughes, and fourth-year students Kieran Gilday and Michael Cheah from the Cambridge Department of Engineering’s Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab.
Their arm was designed to allow for both suction and grabbing. This allowed a larger number of objects to be manipulated.
The gripper itself allowed for three methods movement by changing the grasping diameter, changing the angle of the suction head, or modify the grasping arm movement.
