What happened to the robot hand with no fingers?

In 2010 a paper described a gripper with no fingers: a rubber bag of loose grains — ground coffee will do — pressed onto an object. While the grains can flow, the bag settles around the shape. Draw the air out and the grains lock together; the bag goes hard and holds. Let the air back in and it lets go. It looks more like a beanbag than a hand. The paper of 2010 was the first to make it work and measure it, and it travelled: cited 1,560 times as OpenAlex counts, 1,352 of those in our collection. Then came the harder question, which papers rarely answer: could you buy one?

Two Cornell students — John Amend, an author of those papers, and Bill Culley — founded Empire Robotics in 2012 to sell the gripper to factories, and sold it from 2014 as the VERSABALL. Their own account, published in 2016, lists the questions a factory asks a gripper before buying it — from air consumption per grip to shelf life — and says which ones decided sales. The lab’s balloon lasted about 1,000 grips. A line making three grips a minute would wear one out in days, so the wear parts went into a head that snaps off, and the company learned to dip-mould its own membranes: more than 50 rubber formulas to reach about 50,000 grips.

In spring 2016 Empire Robotics closed. The authors’ explanation, in their own words: they could not “identify and solve a large enough market problem with the product specifications we were able to achieve”. Not for want of trying. Interest came overwhelmingly from factories — plastics 25%, consumer goods 20%, car parts 15%, packaging 15%, food 10% — and the gripper was sold, shown at more than 20 trade shows, tested on more than 100 applications. Read the account for what it is: one document, written by people with a financial interest in the company, explaining a technical ceiling. It does not say what those customers bought instead, or what a competitor offered, and neither do we.

A gripper that works in a laboratory is a membrane and some grains. A gripper that works in a factory is a head that snaps off, a membrane that survives 50,000 grips, two sizes, a pump, a filter and a price. Two head sizes, 9 cm and 16.5 cm, because a gripper holds best an object about 50% of its own diameter. The distance between the two is not the idea; it is everything around it — and that distance is what this account measures. What happened to the hand with no fingers: it was built, sold and withdrawn, and the mechanism is still in the papers and in the patents.