An effective nonlinear dynamic formulation to analyze grasping capability of soft pneumatic robotic gripper

Abstract

ABSTRACT Soft pneumatic robotic grippers have found extensive applications across various engineering domains, which prompts active research due to their splendid compliance, high flexibility, and safe human-robot interaction over conventional stiff counterparts. Previously simplified rod-based models principally focused on clarifying overall large deformation and bending postures of soft grippers from static or quasi-static perspectives, whereas it is challenging to elaborate grasping characteristics of soft grippers without considering contact interaction and nonlinear large deformation behaviors. To address this, based on absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF), comprehensively allowing for structural complexity, geometric, material and boundary nonlinearities, and incorporating Coulomb’ friction law with a multiple-point contact method, we put forward an effective nonlinear dynamic modeling approach for exploring grasping capability of soft gripper. Moreover, we solved the established dynamic equations using Generalized-α scheme, and conducted thorough numerical simulation analysis on a three-jaw soft pneumatic gripper (SPG) in terms of grasping configurations, displacements and contact forces. The proposed dynamic approach can accurately both describe complicated deformed configurations along with stress distribution and provide a feasible solution to simulate grasping targets, whose effectiveness and precision were analyzed theoretically and verified experimentally, which may shed new light on devising and optimizing other multifunctional SPGs.