TRI Punyo

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Punyo is Toyota Research Institute's answer to a problem most robots dodge: how to pick up things that are big, heavy and awkward. The usual approach is fingertips and careful grasps. Punyo does the opposite — it hugs. Arms, forearms and chest are covered in soft, air-filled 'bubble' surfaces that sense contact, so the robot can lean into an object, take its weight across its whole body and carry it the way a person carries a full laundry basket. The name is a Japanese word for a soft, chubby, resilient sort of cuteness, and TRI's Tactile team describes the machine as an artistic rendering of their dream domestic robot: soft, interactive, affordable, safe, durable and capable. The design intent is unusual — most robots are engineered to avoid contact, while Punyo is built to make a great deal of it safely. Underneath is the team's sensing work. The bubbles are compliant tactile sensors that turn a rigid arm into a soft one, giving the robot readings from deformation rather than from force at a wrist. TRI has published build instructions and design files for the Punyo Bubble Gripper v2.0, which is built around an Intel RealSense D405 depth camera and released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence, so other labs can reproduce it. Punyo is a research platform, not a product. It exists to test whole-body manipulation and contact-rich control, feeding TRI's wider work on mobile manipulation and large behaviour models.

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