Abstract
Compared with traditional rigid gripper with joint-linkage structure, novel soft robotic gripper gives rise to continuous concern for the advantages of no-damage grasping, convenient manufacture, easy control, and low cost. In this study, we design and built two kinds of soft robotic grippers with four fiber-reinforced soft actuators which are distributed in circular and rectangle shapes for single and twin contacts grasping. A novel hybrid valve pneumatic control scheme combining proportional and solenoid valves is proposed. Also, a mode controllable hybrid valve pressure control method is proposed to adjust internal pressure of soft robotic grippers to adapt to different grasping tasks. The experiment results verify that the performances of hybrid valve outperform those of individual proportional valve or solenoid valve in the aspects of response time and steady-state accuracy. The hybrid valve has wide range of pressure regulation, result in that the soft robotic grippers are qualified to grasp various objects with different shapes, sizes, and weights.
Highlights
The robotic gripper is one of the key parts of manipulation robots
The experiment results verify that the proposed Hybrid valve pneumatic control (HVPC) scheme is feasible and effective and excel individual proportional valve and individual solenoid valve
With the help of bolts and nuts, the upper lid will attach to the baseboard tightly after the soft actuators are inserted into the holes in baseboard, and the top of the soft actuators is placed between upper lid and baseboard
Summary
The robotic gripper is one of the key parts of manipulation robots. Traditional robotic grippers are rigid joint-linkage structure, result in that there exists rigid contract between robotic grippers and grasped objects.[1,2] there are enormous challenges of sensing and control to perform precise and no-damage grasping. Li et al.[9] manufacture a more complex soft gripper with a pack of particles, and when inflated, the larger squeezing pressure of particle jamming would promote the stiffness, so that this soft gripper can be applied to more occasions These SRGs overcome the limitation of rigid contract and show great superiority on many. One SRG has twin contacts (hereinafter referred to TC-SRG) with rectangle distribution of soft actuators, while the other SRG has single contact (hereinafter referred to SC-SRG) with circular distribution of soft actuators These two structures are designed to grasp various kinds of object with different shapes, sizes, and weights. The experiment results verify that the proposed HVPC scheme is feasible and effective and excel individual proportional valve and individual solenoid valve.
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