Soft Grippers: Food Industry’s New Friend

Midway through George Whitesides’ lecture on soft robotics, he makes an interesting point about soft grippers that should grab the attention of every gripper developer.

Whitesides, a Harvard chemist, is world famous for the work he and his Whitesides Research Group have accomplished in pioneering soft robotics—specifically, soft gripper tech, for the better part of a decade. The soft gripper his team invented is out in the marketplace and doing well, which gives him the right to crow about it in his well-attended lectures.  

He’s brilliant, a character, and low key but firm in his pronounce-ments about the future of soft robotics. He spun a DARPA grant from back in 2008 into a private company called Soft Robotics in 2013, perfected his soft grippers in 2015, sold many, and in January of 2020 closed on a $23 million investment from the likes of Yamaha, Honeywell, and FANUC…the world’s largest robot maker. That was on top of a cool $20 million investment from 2018.

His soft grippers went from a bare, untried idea in 2008 to $43 million worth of belief in 2020.

He’s a great success, so it’s easy to see why his entertaining lectures on soft robotics are closely followed and thoroughly reported on. 

When, during his lectures, he says in an offhand way that food companies want to get rid of people in food production; saying that people are slow, and worse… they’re germ carriers, he’s hit upon a potential mother lode of robot gripper sales that, conceivably, could also spark mega-sales in cobots.

And since there are barely five makers of soft grippers selling their wares in the global marketplace today, Whitesides’ understated remark about food companies targeting people for an exit, is downright nuclear.

Here, in alpha order, are the youthful frontrunners of soft gripper tech:

OnRobot (Denmark, founded 2018)

Soft Robot Tech Co. (SRT) (China, founded 2016)

Soft Robotics (US, founded 2013)

The Gripper Company (Denmark, founded 2020)

UBIROS (US, founded 2019)

If you click over to the Cobotics World catalog of robots and grippers, there are over 100 grippers, 99 percent of which are hard or rigid grippers made from steel. Nearly all are off chasing after the holy grail of robotics—automated bin picking— where there’s untold billions of dollars awaiting a robot solution. Most soft gripper makers are also eyeing a bin-picking jackpot, although the food industry may well be their best chance for success.

Look around, there’s hardly a business larger than the food industry. Plunkett’s Research says the global food and agricultural industry totals about $8.7 trillion, or about 10 percent of the world’s GDP. That’s a mighty big playground in which to ply the sale of a soft gripper. There are millions of production workers in the food biz which, according to Whitesides, food companies would love to jettison. So, sales of soft grippers into food companies would be addressed to potential customers already predisposed to an alternative to human workers.

That’s a great entre, but there’s one better.

A singular motivation for switching out humans for robots with soft grippers is, as Whitesides says, humans carry germs.

Do we ever! Better than 70 percent of all foodborne illnesses are transmitted by people. “The pathogens most likely to be transmitted by food workers are norovirus, hepatitis A, Salmonella, Shigella, and Staphylococcus aureus.” That’s a bad group of human-hating viruses. And, as we’ve learned lately, COVID is a gang member as well.

“Pathogens of fecal, nose or throat, and skin origin are most likely to be transmitted by the hands, highlighting the need for effective hand hygiene and other barriers to pathogen contamination, such as no bare hand contact with ready-to-eat food.”

In the U.S., even with the passage in 2011 of “the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, the U.S. is still experiencing hundreds of food recalls every year, many of which are extremely serious; 1 in 6 Americans contracts a foodborne illness every year. The most hazardous meat and poultry recalls (Class I) have nearly doubled since 2013 with an 85 percent increase. Class I refers to food that presents serious health risks such as containing botulinal toxins or undeclared allergens.”

See related:
Automated Meat Processing Post-COVID
Humans in the loop is a virus time bomb. New-age infrastructure change is needed to secure the meat supply
Even if pathogens are not a worry, things like bruised fruit or crushed bakery and confectionary foods can be helped out by soft grippers. In the U.S., the State of Washington produces 5 billion apples annually. Each one is laboriously handpicked and then further human-handled from orchard to supermarket. Times five billion is a lot of labor! Robots with soft grippers could be a low-cost, tireless, and speedy alternative to human labor. Soft grippers are gentle on fruit, as well as many other food items, so they should be naturals for the food industry.

On a secondary level, soft grippers could benefit the nation’s health. With the population of the U.S. at 331 million, what sort of relief would the healthcare system experience when 55 million (the 1 in 6 who annually contract a foodborne illness) don’t need treatment?

The soft gripper is a youthful technology; as noted from the list of five, the eldest developer opened shop in 2013; the most recent two, UBIROS and The Gripper Company, in 2019 and 2020 respectively. That’s young, although laboratory research in the concept has been around since 1980. See the chronological chart in Jun Shitake et al Soft Robotic Grippers, for a look back at the evolution of soft grippers using either actuation, or controlled stiffness, or controlled adhesion. Today, in addition to the five in the marketplace, there are another half dozen plodding along in labs.

The contenders
There is certainly room for all five soft gripper contenders in the food industry. All five are made from food-safe and stretchy elastometric materials, including elastic silicone; and all five have been approved for food handling both in the U.S. and the EU (FDA 21 CFR, and the EU’s EC 1935/2004 certifications), plus all are washable.

Two are nearly twins: Soft Robotics (U.S.) and SRT (China). Both “use networks of channels in elastomers that inflate like balloons for actuation. Using a series of parallel chambers embedded in the elastomers as a repeating component and then stacking or connecting these components enables us to design and test prototype structures providing complex movements by intuition (empirically),” says Soft Robotics.