Final Year Project on Robotic Gripper Recognized at ASM Technology Award 2017

07/08/2017

Final Year Project on Robotic Gripper Recognized at ASM Technology Award 2017

(From left) Prof Michael Wang, Prof Lilong Cai, Dr Gary Peter Widdowson (Vice President, Technology, ASMPT), Chenxi Feng, Alexander Yu Tse and Chunli Jiang [Download Photo]

The wining team of the HKUST President’s Cup 2017 received further recognition of their final year project on a flexible robotic gripper called “Smart Soft End Effector” when they recently won the Gold Award in the ASM Technology Award 2017.

Supervised by Profs Lilong Cai and Michael Wang, the team is comprised of five Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering undergraduates, namely Chenxi Feng, Chunli Jiang, Alexander Yu Tse, Zihang Zhang and Peng Zhou.

Their project involved designing and manufacturing a smart soft gripper which provides an adaptive grasping motion to objects of different shapes and sizes. Unlike the current robotic grippers in the market which are expensive, complicated and time-consuming to develop a working system, their novel low-cost soft robotic gripper is integrated with a set of flexible sensors. The result of the project is so satisfying that the real prototype is able to handle not only objects of different shapes and sizes, but also delicate items like a piece of tofu without damaging it. The team believed that their robotic gripper has potential for other applications like medical services and rescue mission that will bring hope and benefit to more people.

Launched by ASM Pacific Technology Limited (ASMPT) in 2015, the ASM Technology Award promotes technological innovation in Hong Kong and honors the best and brightest students for their accomplishments in technology.

This year, 10 nominated final year projects developed by undergraduates with engineering or related background from CityU, CUHK, HKU, HKUST and PolyU entered the competition. The teams made presentation on July 7 and the award presentation ceremony was held on August 4. The Gold Award team from HKUST was presented with a scholarship of HK$50,000. As the Gold Award team’s home institution, the School of Engineering received the ASM Pacific Technology Scholarship of HK$100,000 to recognize and reward students with outstanding academic performance.