Robotics hand/grippers nowadays are not limited to manufacturing lines; instead, they are widely utilized in cluttered environments, such as restaurants, farms, and warehouses. In such scenarios, they need to deal with high uncertainty of the grasped objects' shapes, postures, surfaces, and material properties, which requires complex integration of sensing and decision-making process. On the other hand, integrating soft materials into the gripper's design may tolerate the above uncertainties and reduce complexity in control. In this paper, we introduce ROSE, a novel soft gripper that can embrace the object and squeeze it by buckling a funnel-liked thin-walled soft membrane around the object by simple rotation of the base. Thanks to this design, ROSE hand can adapt to a wide range of objects that can fit in the funnel and handle with gentle gripping force. Regardless of this, ROSE can generate a high lift force (up to 33kgf) while significantly reducing the normal pressure on the gripped objects. In our experiment, a 198g ROSE can be integrated into a robot arm with a single actuation and successfully lift various types of objects, even after 400,000 trials. The embracing mechanism helps reduce the dependence of friction between the object and the membrane, as ROSE could pick up a chicken egg submerged inside an olive oil tank. We also report a feasible design for equipping the ROSE hand with tactile sensing while appealing to the scalability of the design to fit a wide range of objects. Video: https://youtu.be/E1wAI09LaoY

Terns are a family of shorebirds that can nest in marginal conditions and thrive everywhere from beaches to wetlands to rivers to inlets. TERN, or the Tactically Exploited Reconnaissance Node, is a drone developed by Northrop Grumman for both the DARPA and the Office of Naval Research, with the goal of giving the Navy and Marine Corps a versatile flying scout that can support ships and troops almost anywhere they may be. Today, DARPA announced funding for Phase III of the project, which aims to take it from a mere concept to a working, flying, fighting robot by 2018. So what, exactly, does TERN do? It perches on ships, even small ships without runways, and then takes off vertically like a helicopter, before transitioning to plane-like horizontal flight in midair.