Demonstrating static electricity by using a charged balloon to levitate your hair is a classic science experiment. But, imagine if you could harness the same static cling to handle a material as fragile as an egg, as flimsy as soft fabric — or to assemble the uppers of Nike trainers at 20 times the pace of a human worker. Hatched in the heart of Silicon Valley, in Sunnyvale, California, robotics start-up Grabit is harnessing static electricity, machine learning and automation from Shibaura Machine partner, TM Robotics, to do just that. Material handling is one of the most labour-intensive and expensive aspects of manufacturing, and when dealing with an array of different materials, the process is impossible to automate. Assembling a pair of Nikes requires as many as 40 pieces of material to be stacked and heated to create the upper — the flexible part that sits on top of your foot. For a human worker, arranging the pieces of material can take up to 20 minutes. However, Grabit’s technology allows a machine to do this in as little as 50 seconds.