Suction Cup Based on Particle Jamming and Its Performance Comparison in Various Fruit Handling Tasks

Abstract

Suction cups are widely used in pick and place tasks in well-structured and controlled environments with low variance in task requirements. For tasks requiring higher demands and variations, such as quality control of citrus fruits, commercial suction cups do not have the required reliability. The design and performance of a novel suction cup based on particle jamming is presented in this paper. Particle jamming allows operation in two states, a malleable state to adapt to large irregularities in object surfaces, and a stiff state to rigidly hold the object for manipulation and prevent the cup collapsing in on itself. This jamming cup is shown to successfully adapt to surfaces with up to 7 times variations compared to standard suction cups. Additionally, for similar scale cups, the holding force is comparable and has <50% deviation.