Abstract
Bio-inspirations from soft-bodied animals provide a rich design source for soft robots, yet limited literature explored the potential enhancement from rigid-bodied ones. This paper draws inspiration from the tooth profiles of the rigid claws of the Boston Lobster, aiming at an enhanced soft finger surface for underwater grasping using an iterative design process. The lobsters distinguish themselves from other marine animals with a pair of claws capable of dexterous object manipulation both on land and underwater. We proposed a 3-stage design iteration process that involves raw imitation, design parametric exploration, and bionic parametric exploitation on the original tooth profiles on the claws of the Boston Lobster. Eventually, 7 finger surface designs were generated and fabricated with soft silicone. We validated each design stage through many vision-based robotic grasping attempts against selected objects from the Evolved Grasping Analysis Dataset (EGAD). Over 14,000 grasp attempts were accumulated on land (71.4%) and underwater (28.6%), where we selected the optimal design through an on-land experiment and further tested its capability underwater. As a result, we observed an 18.2% improvement in grasping success rate at most from a resultant bionic finger surface design, compared with those without the surface, and a 10.4% improvement at most compared with the validation design from the previous literature. Results from this paper are relevant and consistent with the bioresearch earlier in 1911, showing the value of bionics. The results indicate the capability and competence of the optimal bionic finger surface design in an amphibious environment, which can contribute to future research in enhanced underwater grasping using soft robots.
Highlights
The biological structure has been a critical source of design inspiration for advanced robotic systems, where soft-bodied animals, both on land and under the water, have shown numerous successful applications in novel designs of soft robots (Stilli et al, 2014; Te et al, 2020; Mao et al, 2013)
We explored a lobster-inspired bionic design for a soft robotic finger surface by leveraging the rigid–soft interactions for both on-land and underwater usage
We put up a total of 7 contact surface designs inspired by the claws of the Boston Lobster in a 3-stage design iteration process to enhance the stability and reliability of robotic grasping
Summary
The biological structure has been a critical source of design inspiration for advanced robotic systems, where soft-bodied animals, both on land and under the water, have shown numerous successful applications in novel designs of soft robots (Stilli et al, 2014; Te et al, 2020; Mao et al, 2013). There are a class of creatures with exoskeletons, where the rigid shell structure encloses the soft muscles and organs as a result of natural selection, commonly observed among the crustaceans that live under the ocean or in an amphibian environment with both land and water (Xu et al, 2020). In this case, the tactile information remains available but is restricted to a limited extent. It becomes an exciting subject to study the “skin” pattern of the rigid shells among these exoskeleton animals during manipulation tasks while operating in a challenging environment with water, which is a field with limited research
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