Design Fabrication and Control of Soft Robotic Gripper for Material Handling

Abstract

In recent years, soft robotics attracts the attention of robotic gripper research community in the wider range. Currently, many research analyses have been conducted on the area of material handling by utilizing soft robotic gripper technology for experimenting the various grasping techniques such as bioinspired, biomimetic design, silicon soft structure analysis, deformation and reinforcement sensing, various fabrication techniques, soft machine learning and soft composite. The presented research results enumerate the detailed fabrication process and control scheme for the soft robotic finger mainly toward the role of manipulator. The necessity of developing the soft robotic grippers specifically to perform various grasping action with standard size and shapes of objects. The proposed soft finger contains three axially aligned chambers, which are actuated independently to provide the imitator contribution of the human finger. The developed three-dimensional model of the soft finger is established using SolidWorks software and analyzed in ABAQUS and finite element analysis software. The analysis results reveal that the proposed model can withstand larger pressure and achieve different deformation in each chamber to perform material handling with excellent grasping techniques.