Abstract
While suction cups prevail as common gripping tools for a wide range of real‐world parts and surfaces, they often fail to seal the contact interface when engaging with irregular shapes and textured surfaces. In this work, the authors propose a suction‐based soft robotic gripper where suction is created inside a self‐sealing, highly conformable and thin flat elastic membrane contacting a given part surface. Such soft gripper can self‐adapt the size of its effective suction area with respect to the applied load. The elastomeric membrane covering edge of the soft gripper can develop an air‐tight self‐sealing with parts even smaller than the gripper diameter. Such gripper shows 4 times higher adhesion than the one without the membrane on various textured surfaces. The two major advantages, underactuated self‐adaptability and enhanced suction performance, allow the membrane‐based suction mechanism to grip various three‐dimensional (3D) geometries and delicate parts, such as egg, lime, apple, and even hydrogels without noticeable damage, which can have not been gripped with the previous adhesive microstructures‐based and active suction‐based soft grippers. The structural and material simplicity of the proposed soft gripper design can have a broad use in diverse fields, such as digital manufacturing, robotic manipulation, transfer printing, and medical gripping.
Highlights
This page was generated automatically upon download from the ETH Zurich Research Collection
The size of cavity depends on the surface roughness and how much volume of air was initially entrapped at the contact interface before ∆P pulls the FM
When the gripper is retracted from the substrate, deformation of the gripper body opens an additional area of the membrane to be exposed to ∆P, resulting in passive expansion of the suction cavity (Figure 2A-III,B-III)
Summary
This page was generated automatically upon download from the ETH Zurich Research Collection. The authors propose a suction-based soft robotic gripper where suction is created inside a self-sealing, highly conformable and thin flat elastic membrane contacting a given part surface Such soft gripper can self-adapt the size of its contact interface when engaging with irregular shapes and textured surfaces. Suction cups need to be cusmembrane covering edge of the soft gripper can develop an air-tight tomized depending on the shape and surself-sealing with parts even smaller than the gripper diameter Such gripper shows 4 times higher adhesion than the one without the membrane on various textured surfaces. Takadesign can have a broad use in diverse fields, such as digital manufacturing, hashi et al showed improved suction robotic manipulation, transfer printing, and medical gripping
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