Passive robotic gripping for the hardest-to-handle sustainable materials

The Weird Gripper Company has developed a novel robotic end-effector that enables automation where conventional gripping technologies fail. Our gripper uses a passive physical phenomenon—tangling—to pick and handle soft, flexible, deformable, or entangled materials such as fresh herbs, textiles, nets, films, meshes, compostable packaging, and waste streams.

Unlike suction or fingered grippers, our technology requires no sensing, vision, vacuum, or complex control. It can operate without a dedicated power supply, making it robust, low-cost, and well-suited to high-throughput, sustainability-focused applications. This opens new automation opportunities in food production, packaging, recycling, and circular economy systems where labour shortages, contamination risk, and material variability are major barriers.

We are seeking partners across sustainable packaging, agri-food, recycling, and materials innovation to explore pilot trials, system integration, and co-development opportunities. We are particularly interested in applications involving returnable packaging, biodegradable materials, textile recycling, and complex waste streams that are currently handled manually.