Development of the "Origami Hand"

Abstract

In recent years, robots have been introduced to solve the problem of labor shortage and heavy labor. However, there are many environments where it is still difficult to apply robots. For example, in a food processing plant, robots must hold food of various shapes and hardness. Therefore, we need to control them in a complex way. In addition, in food factories and medical facilities, robots need to directly touch the object to grasp, so we strict sterilization and regular maintenance are required each time they are used. The purpose of this research is to solve the problems such as cost, maintainability and hygiene in the conventional robot hand. We developed a robot hand that can be made of paper. We call it “Origami Hand”. Since it does not use mechanical parts, it has many advantages, such as low risk of breakdown, safety due to flexible materials, and high freedom of shape size deployment. And we can make it cheap and replace it once it's finished. We actually grasped various objects using “Origami hand” and checked if it would work.