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MIT robot's flytrap gripper can grab both fragile and heavy objects
Robot hands tend to skew toward extremes. They can pick up delicate objects or heavy objects, but rarely both. MIT CSAIL's solution? Avoid hands altogether. Its researchers have developed a Venus flytrap-like gripper that can grab objects as fragile as a grape, but also items 100 times its weight -- even if they're oddly shaped. The trick relies on a combination of clever physics with brute force.
Venus flytraps are far from 'dumb'
When I was a kid, I had a Venus flytrap that lived all of about a week. I couldn't figure out why it hadn't eaten the morsel of raw hamburger I'd put in its "mouth," and it died of starvation shortly after the beef grew white fuzzies on it. Turns out I hadn't triggered the hairs inside the plant's jaws that cause them to close and its digestive system to start producing the enzymes that break down food. In a recent research paper noticed by the BBC, scientists from the University of Würzburg discovered that the amount of times those follicles are triggered corresponds to what the carnivorous plant's guts do, in addition to how it absorbs nutrients from captured-and-digested prey.
