Abstract
For soft grippers to be applied in atypical industrial environments, they must conform to an object’s exterior shape and momentarily change their stiffness. However, many of the existing grippers have limitations with respect to these functions: they grasp an object with only a single curvature and a fixed stiffness. Consequently, those constraints limit the stability of grasping and the applications. This paper introduces a new multicurvature, variable-stiffness soft gripper. Inspired by the human phalanx and combining the phalanx structure and particle jamming, this work guarantees the required grasping functions. Unlike the existing soft pneumatic grippers with one curvature and one stiffness, this work tries to divide the pressurized actuating region into three parts to generate multiple curvatures for a gripper finger, enabling the gripper to increase its degrees of freedom. Furthermore, to prevent stiffness loss at an unpressurized segment, this work combines divided actuation and the variable-stiffness capability, which guarantee successful grasping actions. In summary, this gripper generates multiple grasping curvatures with the proper stiffness, enhancing its dexterity. This work introduces the new soft gripper’s design, analytical modeling, and fabrication method and verifies the analytic model by comparing it with FEM simulations and experimental results.
Highlights
Typical robotic tasks have recently changed from repetitive tasks in fixed environments to performing tasks in various atypical environments
Existing robots made of rigid materials require sophisticated control, cannot quickly adapt to atypical environments, and are difficult to use in situations requiring human–robot interaction due to safety issues
Soft robotic actuation [4,5,6,7,8] has been actively adopted in general soft robotic mechanisms, including manipulators [9,10], soft actuators [11], soft grippers [12,13,14], and rotating soft actuator systems [15]
Summary
Typical robotic tasks have recently changed from repetitive tasks in fixed environments to performing tasks in various atypical environments. The LMPA is inserted under the soft gripper and transfers heat using conductive Ni-Cr to melt the desired part to increase the desired curvature’s stiffness Since these methods adjust the stiffness using phase changes through temperature, they are difficult to control, and it is very slow to heat them up and cool them down. The gripper in (h) has multiple curvatures and variable stiffness; similar to the LMPA, the SMP uses heat to change the stiffness, so it is difficult to control, and the increasing and decreasing of the temperature is slow. By dividing a pneumatic actuation chamber for creating pseudo-independent joints and combining them with a particle jamming-based variable stiffness mechanism, this work enables the new soft gripper to have expanded DOF and enhanced dexterity.
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