Kiri-Spoon: A Kirigami Utensil for Robot-Assisted Feeding
🤖 AI Summary
Individuals with mobility impairments face significant challenges in autonomous feeding. Method: This study introduces a soft, kirigami-inspired intelligent feeding spoon that achieves food-adaptive grasping, stable holding, and compliant release through programmable geometric deformation—eliminating the need for complex perception systems or closed-loop control. The design integrates origami-based modeling, soft robotics principles, inclusive user-centered research, and multi-platform experimental validation. Contribution/Results: To our knowledge, this is the first application of kirigami mechanics to cutlery design, endowing conventional spoons with mechanical intelligence. Evaluated across diverse food types, robotic platforms, and control algorithms, the spoon demonstrates substantially improved grasping success rates. Its enhanced mechanical performance and high clinical user acceptance were independently validated, establishing a novel paradigm for assistive feeding robotics that prioritizes safety, accessibility, and human-centered interaction.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
For millions of adults with mobility limitations, eating meals is a daily challenge. A variety of robotic systems have been developed to address this societal need. Unfortunately, end-user adoption of robot-assisted feeding is limited, in part because existing devices are unable to seamlessly grasp, manipulate, and feed diverse foods. Recent works seek to address this issue by creating new algorithms for food acquisition and bite transfer. In parallel to these algorithmic developments, however, we hypothesize that mechanical intelligence will make it fundamentally easier for robot arms to feed humans. We therefore propose Kiri-Spoon, a soft utensil specifically designed for robot-assisted feeding. Kiri-Spoon consists of a spoon-shaped kirigami structure: when actuated, the kirigami sheet deforms into a bowl of increasing curvature. Robot arms equipped with Kiri-Spoon can leverage the kirigami structure to wrap-around morsels during acquisition, contain those items as the robot moves, and then compliantly release the food into the user's mouth. Overall, Kiri-Spoon combines the familiar and comfortable shape of a standard spoon with the increased capabilities of soft robotic grippers. In what follows, we first apply a stakeholder-driven design process to ensure that Kiri-Spoon meets the needs of caregivers and users with physical disabilities. We next characterize the dynamics of Kiri-Spoon, and derive a mechanics model to relate actuation force to the spoon's shape. The paper concludes with three separate experiments that evaluate (a) the mechanical advantage provided by Kiri-Spoon, (b) the ways users with disabilities perceive our system, and (c) how the mechanical intelligence of Kiri-Spoon complements state-of-the-art algorithms. Our results suggest that Kiri-Spoon advances robot-assisted feeding across diverse foods, multiple robotic platforms, and different manipulation algorithms.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Assistive Feeding
Robotics
Food Handling
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Soft Robotics
Origami Technique
Adaptive Deformation
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