Passive gripper inspired by Manduca sexta and the Fin Ray® Effect

Whitney Crooks,William Messner,Shane Rozen-Levy,Barry Trimmer,Chris Rogers

doi:10.1177/1729881417721155

Whitney Crooks, William Messner + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/1729881417721155

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Abstract

Soft robotic grippers are advantageous for tasks in which a robot comes into close contact with a human, must handle a delicate object, or needs to conform to an object. Most soft robotic grippers, like their hard counterparts, require actuation to maintain a grip on an object. Here, we present a passive, soft robotic gripper that requires power to open and close but not to maintain a grip, which can be problematic in environments with limited energy availability (e.g. solar or battery power). Passive grip, by not requiring power to maintain grip on an object, provides a unique and safe alternative to energy-limited or energy-scarce environments. The Tufts Passive Gripper was inspired by the passive grip of the Manduca sexta and the simplicity of the Fin Ray® Effect. The gripper can be three-dimensional printed as one part on a multimaterial three-dimensional printer and only requires four additional steps to install the motor/tendon actuation mechanism. The gripper was capable of picking up over 40 common household objects, including a tissue, a pen, silverware, a needle, a stapler, a cup, and so on. The maximum load a gripper could hold when oriented perpendicular and parallel to the ground was 530 g (1 lb) and 240 g (0.5 lb), respectively.

Highlights

Bio-inspired manipulators have their roots in the mid-20th century with hand-like grippers such as the Okada hand,[1] Stanford/JPL hand,[2] and the Utah/MIT hand.[3,4] These hands mimicked the bones and tendon structure of the human hand and were primarily driven by tendon/motor systems
We present the Tufts Passive Gripper (TPG), a passive, bio-inspired gripper incorporating soft and hard components that can be three-dimensional (3-D) printed as a single part and has limited additional steps to attach the motor/ tendon system for actuation
This manipulator is inspired by the Manduca sexta, which is a passive gripper requiring no energy to grip an object but must activate its muscles to release, and the Fin Ray® Effect, which is derived from the anatomy of fish fins

Summary

Introduction

Bio-inspired manipulators have their roots in the mid-20th century with hand-like grippers such as the Okada hand,[1] Stanford/JPL hand,[2] and the Utah/MIT hand.[3,4] These hands mimicked the bones and tendon structure of the human hand and were primarily driven by tendon/motor systems. We present the Tufts Passive Gripper (TPG), a passive, bio-inspired gripper incorporating soft and hard components that can be three-dimensional (3-D) printed as a single part and has limited additional steps to attach the motor/ tendon system for actuation This manipulator is inspired by the Manduca sexta, which is a passive gripper requiring no energy to grip an object but must activate its muscles to release, and the Fin Ray® Effect, which is derived from the anatomy of fish fins. This causes the tip to bend toward the force, resulting in grip.[23,24,25,26] Altering the angle of the crossbeams with respect to the base creates a preferred bending direction, as previously demonstrated,[27] that we can take advantage of to decrease the load the motor must provide to actuate the gripper Combining these two inspirations resulted in adapting the Fin Ray® Effect for a passive gripper that behaves similar to the M. sexta proleg. The TPG was controlled by a myRIO 1900 (National Instruments, Austin, TX, USA) and was programmed in LabVIEW (National Instruments)

Experimental methods and results

Conclusions