Robotic claws, or grippers, are notoriously hard to use — remember trying to pick up a toy with an arcade claw machine as a kid (or an adult)? But a new soft gripper designed by researchers at the ...

A viral video of a baby monkey hugging a plush toy sparked global interest in comfort objects. Adults too find solace in ...

Folks blessed with a soft touch seem to have no problem getting to grips with delicate objects, but it can be a tough ask for robots. Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering ...

Johns Hopkins University engineers have developed a pioneering prosthetic hand that can grip plush toys, water bottles, and other everyday objects like a human, carefully conforming and adjusting its ...

Traditional robots can have difficulty grasping and manipulating soft objects if their manipulators are not flexible in the way elephant trunks, octopus tentacles, or human fingers can be.

A team at Disney Research has developed a new type of 3D printer that can build three-dimensional objects such as teddy bears out of soft fibres such as wool. The machine looks like a cross between a ...

Taking inspiration from nature, researchers designed a new type of soft, robotic gripper that uses a collection of thin tentacles to entangle and ensnare objects, similar to how jellyfish collect ...

New technology that invites expressive, two-way communication between a person and the soft, flexible object they are holding or wearing has been developed at the University of Bath. Using this system ...