Aerial robots meet many industrial needs, but their gripping capacity, reduced to a metal clip, is not adapted to complex objects. The MAMBO project offers a new solution: a soft gripper, composed of a soft body that can withstand a large deformation and thus adapt to any object shape.
Robotics is today experiencing a paradigmatic revolution. The “stiffer is better” of our rigid robots is challenged by a new generation of robots with controlled deformations of finite amplitudes. This is the case of trunk-robots in soft robotics, continuum robots in medical robotics or hyper-redundant eel/snake-robots in bio-inspired robotics.
Due to their parallel and modular structure, cable-driven parallel robots are very well suited for the implementation of a reconfiguration option. The term reconfiguration refers to the adaptation of the robot structure to a changed requirement.
Endless rotation about an axis is widespread among manipulators for industrial use. Manipulators, such as articulated robots, Delta, or SCARA robots, provide endless rotation about at least one axis to arbitrarily change the orientation of the workpiece handled.
Advanced manufacturing companies are confronted with the challenge of managing product quality objectives while minimising resource utilisation and waste. Zero defect manufacturing (ZDM) represents a contemporary paradigm that goes beyond traditional six-sigma approaches, particularly within Europe’s highly technology-intensive and strategically important manufacturing sectors.
In a project funded by the state of Baden-Württemberg, Fraunhofer IPA developed next-generation energy storage technologies. Together with industrial partners, materials and production processes were developed for asymmetric energy storage devices, so-called power caps, which combine the respective advantages of batteries and supercapacitors in a hybrid system.