A Soft-Robotic Gripper With Enhanced Object Adaptation and Grasping Reliability

A novel soft-robotic gripper design is presented, with three soft bending fingers and one passively adaptive palm. Each soft finger comprises two ellipse-profiled pneumatic chambers. Combined with the adaptive palm and the surface patterned feature, the soft gripper could achieve 40-N grasping force...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 2; no. 4; pp. 2287 - 2293
Main Authors Zhou, Jianshu, Chen, Shu, Wang, Zheng
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.10.2017
Subjects
Actuators
Grasping
Grippers
pneumatic actuators
Reliability
Robots
Soft robotics
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Summary:A novel soft-robotic gripper design is presented, with three soft bending fingers and one passively adaptive palm. Each soft finger comprises two ellipse-profiled pneumatic chambers. Combined with the adaptive palm and the surface patterned feature, the soft gripper could achieve 40-N grasping force in practice, 10 times the self-weight, at a very low actuation pressure below 100 kPa. With novel soft finger design, the gripper could pick up small objects, as well as conform to large convex-shape objects with reliable contact. The fabrication process was presented in detail, involving commercial-grade three-dimensional printing and molding of silicone rubber. The fabricated actuators and gripper were tested on a dedicated platform, showing the gripper could reliably grasp objects of various shapes and sizes, even with external disturbances.
ISSN:2377-3766
2377-3766
DOI:10.1109/LRA.2017.2716445