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Machines prepare to rise: Yale lab creates flying, grabbing robot

Yale’s GRAB Lab can lend you a flying hand.

The Yale Aerial Manipulator, developed at the lab, is the first robotic helicopter project to successfully pick up objects of all sorts off the ground using a Shape Deposition Manufacturing robotic hand. Mechanical engineering professors Aaron Dollar and Paul Pounds of the Grasping & Manipulation, Rehabilitation Robotics, and Biomechanics lab on Hillhouse Ave. submitted a paper to the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (IRCA) last month on the project. Although one robotics expert said he had never heard of the project, the GRAB lab team said they are excited about the possible applications of the robot.

“Most [flying] robots now are ‘look but no touch,’they fly around and stare but don’t interact with [objects on the ground],” Pounds said. “In fact, the only interaction is usually a cruise missile.”

Dollar and Pounds aimed to diversify the interactions between flying robots and objects on the ground. Their answer, after almost two years of research, was the Yale Aerial Manipulator, which Pounds described as a helicopter with a robotic hand on the bottom.

The Manipulator can hover above the ground and pick up almost anything, from softballs to beer cans, without landing on the ground or destabilizing itself.

Read the full story at the Yale Daily News.

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