Here's one with balloons filled with coffee/sand for irregular surfaces: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-10/coffee-fil...

Why does it even need fingers? It seems they don't add much value over just the sucker.

Their sales pitch seems to be roughly that the value is more in the machine learning software than the gripper itself. I assume having both means the software can choose how much of each (fingers/suction) to use for a particular item, after it identifies the item.

So perhaps it's supposed to work best when there's a variety of items versus a few predictable ones.

This article has some background: https://xconomy.com/boston/2017/03/28/righthand-robotics-pic...

Also, they seem to have started with fingers only, so there's probably some bias to keep them.

I think the capability of surrounding the item adds a lot of stability to the handling.

However, I also think octopuses arms are the ultimate design, and this robot will eventually evolve towards that design.

while certainly cool, i have always found such robots disturbing because instead of being used to sort recycling or some other useful purpose, they are meant to actually increase the disposal of plastic and other such waste by moving product at ever increasing rates.