Biomimetic gripper (w/ gesture control)

As a 16-year-old trying to make my desk my own, I wanted to design something that was uniquely mine: something cool to look at, and joyful to use. Given that I was probably going to end up using my printer, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and try to win the Instructables Student Design Contest at the same time. I got second and the writeup was very well received.

I settled on designing a third-hand tool given that my desk was already cluttered, so I'd be able to suspend it off the back of my monitor to save space. I designed the "hand" to mimic a bird's beak with a firm front edge and softer interior for clasping a variety of items. I printed the gripper in TPU and the linkages in PLA. To make it actually useful, I used Google's MediaPipe library to recognize hand gestures, which allowed me to control the gripper without needing to touch it.

Considering the Instructables readers who might follow along, I designed another version of the gripper with a screw mechanism in place of a servo to make it more accessible to print.