IIT Madras develops robot with good grasping capability

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras have developed a Multimodal Robotic System with good grasping, manipulation and locomotion abilities for use in industrial and field applications, the IITM said on Wednesday. In a statement issued here, IITM said the robot system called GraspMan consists of a pair of graspers which provides morphological adaptation, enabling it to conform to the geometry of the object being grasped. 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. "The motivation behind this research is to realise a 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," Thondiyath was quoted as saying in the statement.