Abstract
AbstractSoft compliant grasping is essential in delicate manipulation tasks typically required in manufacturing and/or medical applications to prevent stress concentration at the point of contact. In comparison with their rigid counterparts, the intrinsic compliance of soft grippers offers simpler control and planning of the grasping action, especially where robots are faced with a number of objects varying in shape and size. However, quantitative analysis is rarely utilized in the design and fabrication of soft grippers, due to the fact that significant and complex deformation occurs once the soft gripper is in contact with external objects. In this paper, we demonstrate the design of a soft gripper using our novel bimorph-like pneumatic bending actuators. The gripper was modelled through finite element analysis to reflect its gripping capability during interaction with certain targeted objects. The proposed systematic design and analytical model was validated via experiments. The system’s gripping capab...
Highlights
Autonomous gripping has a wide range of applications in industrial, medical and in-home service fields
These inherent properties of fluidic bending actuators (FBA) are mainly dictated by the structure and materials used in design, where typical techniques include asymmetrical profiles (Gorissen, De Volder, De Greef, & Reynaerts, 2011; Gorissen, Donose, Reynaerts, & De Volder, 2011; Gorissen, Vincentie, Al-Bender, & Reynaerts, 2013; Hirai, Masui, & Kawamura, 2001; Konishi et al, 2006; Suzumori, Iikura, & Tanaka, 1991) and/or asymmetrical materials (Che-Ming, John, Manu, Carlo, & Parameswaran, 2011; Onal & Rus, 2012), multi-chamber architectures (Kadowaki, Noritsugu, Takaiwa, Sasaki, & Kato, 2011; Koichi, Shuichi, Kenta, & Kazuhiro, 2013; Martinez et al, 2013; Suzumori, Wakimoto, Miyoshi, & Iwata, 2013) and hybrid designs combining actuators of different working principle (Yang & Chen, 2016)
A pair of 220 mm pneumatic bending actuator (PBA) positioned (Sample A) at 90°, 2 cm apart could be fully closed with an input pressure of 0.5 Maximum pressure allowable in simulation (MPa), i.e. each individual PBA would be able to produce a bending displacement of around 135°
Summary
Autonomous gripping has a wide range of applications in industrial, medical and in-home service fields. Grippers designed around fluidic bending actuators (FBA), which are normally in the form of hyper-elastic synthetic films powered by pressurized fluids (pneumatics or hydraulics), are increasingly gaining attention in pick-and-place applications due to their remarkable characteristics, such as electro-mechanical and chemical stability, excellent conformability and flexibility, light weight, low cost and safety for operation in unstructured situations (Michäel & Dominiek, 2010; Trivedi, Rahn, Kier, & Walker, 2008) They have the ability to provide stable multi-point grasp, substantially reducing the efforts required for accurate modeling, mechanical design, sensing and complex planning of the grasping action, which are usually demanded in rigid-structured counterparts (Bauer et al, 2014; Howard & Bekey, 2000; Robot Manipulation of Deformable Objects, 2000). Since soft robotic grippers have limited control capabilities, a more systematic and thorough design process is needed before fabrication to ensure they have the desired capabilities to perform complex and varying manipulation tasks
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