Vacuum Suckers Research Articles

Bionic Design and Adsorption Performance Analysis of Vacuum Suckers.

This study addresses the problem that the traditional method is not effective in improving the adsorption performance of vacuum suckers. From the perspective of bionics, the adsorption performance of bionic suckers based on the excellent adsorption of the abalone abdominal foot was studied. A bionic sucker was designed by extracting the sealing ring structure of the abdominal foot tentacle. The bionic sucker was subjected to tensile experiments using an orthogonal experimental design, and the adsorption of the bionic sucker was simulated and analyzed to explore its adsorption mechanism. The results show that the primary and secondary factors affecting the adsorption of the sucker are the number of sealing rings, the width of sealing rings and the spacing of sealing rings. At 60% vacuum, the bionic sucker with two sealing rings, a 1.5 mm sealing ring width and 3 mm sealing ring spacing has the largest adsorption force, and its maximum adsorption force is 15.8% higher than that of the standard sucker. This study shows that the bionic sucker design can effectively improve the adsorption performance of the sucker. The bionic sucker had a different stress distribution on the sucker bottom, which resulted in greater Mises stress in the sealing ring and the surrounding area, while the Mises stress in the central area of the sucker was smaller.

Optimal design and experiment of bionic vacuum suckers with high attachment properties

A variety of bionic vacuum suckers with papillae structures of different parameters were developed to improve the attachment performance of vacuum suckers. The oral sucker of the suckermouth catfish served as the bionic prototype and bionic suckers were made by taking the diameter of papillae, the number of single rows of papillae, the center distance between adjacent rows of papillae, and the distance between the outermost row of papillae and the edge as influencing factors. The single-factor tests and response surface tests were carried out respectively with the growth rates of vertical and horizontal attachment forces as the response values. Twenty-five groups of bionic suckers and one group of standard suckers were fabricated and tested for attachment forces. The experimental results revealed that the bionic suckers had higher vertical and horizontal attachment forces than standard suckers and that their maximum growth rates for these forces were 5.16% and 59.87%, respectively. This suggested that the bionic suckers had better attachment performance. The significant orders of the factors affecting response values were established and their interaction was also analyzed. Besides, the optimal parameter combination of papillae structures of the bionic suckers with optimal vertical and horizontal attachment properties was obtained, respectively. Finally, the influence mechanism of papillae structures on the attachment properties of bionic suckers was analyzed. The studies can serve as a guide for the application of bionic suckers in agricultural production areas such as fruit picking and handling, and the improvement of attachment performance of associated machinery.

Snail-inspired robotic swarms: a hybrid connector drives collective adaptation in unstructured outdoor environments

Terrestrial self-reconfigurable robot swarms offer adaptable solutions for various tasks. However, most existing swarms are limited to controlled indoor settings, and often compromise stability due to their freeform connections. To address these issues, we present a snail robotic swarm system inspired by land snails, tailored for unstructured environments. Our system also employs a two-mode connection mechanism, drawing from the adhesive capabilities of land snails. The free mode, mirroring a snail’s natural locomotion, leverages magnet-embedded tracks for freeform mobility, thereby enhancing adaptability and efficiency. The strong mode, analogous to a snail’s response to disturbance, employs a vacuum sucker with directional polymer stalks for robust adhesion. By assigning specific functions to each mode, our system achieves a balance between mobility and secure connections. Outdoor experiments demonstrate the capabilities of individual robots and the exceptional synergy within the swarm. This research advances the real-world applications of terrestrial robotic swarms in unstructured environments.

Grasping detection of dual manipulators based on Markov decision process with neural network

With the development of artificial intelligence, robots are widely used in various fields, grasping detection has been the focus of intelligent robot research. A dual manipulator grasping detection model based on Markov decision process is proposed to realize the stable grasping with complex multiple objects in this paper. Based on the principle of Markov decision process, the cross entropy convolutional neural network and full convolutional neural network are used to parameterize the grasping detection model of dual manipulators which are two-finger manipulator and vacuum sucker manipulator for multi-objective unknown objects. The data set generated in the simulated environment is used to train the two grasping detection networks. By comparing the grasping quality of the detection network output the best grasping by the two grasping methods, the network with better detection effect corresponding to the two grasping methods of two-finger and vacuum sucker is determined, and the dual manipulator grasping detection model is constructed in this paper. Robot grasping experiments are carried out, and the experimental results show that the proposed dual manipulator grasping detection method achieves 90.6% success rate, which is much higher than the other groups of experiments. The feasibility and superiority of the dual manipulator grasping detection method based on Markov decision process are verified.

РАСЧЕТ И ИССЛЕДОВАНИЕ ВАКУУМНОГО ЗАХВАТНОГО УСТРОЙСТВА ДЛЯ ЗАХВАТА И УДЕРЖАНИЯ ГИБКОГО КОНТЕЙНЕРА

The calculation and analytical study of the main power parameters of the vacuum gripper device for capturing, holding and feeding an empty big bag to the position of filling with bulk material has been carried out. Schemes of possible arrangement of vacuum suckers relative to the big bag during its capture are presented.

Design and Development of a Versatile Quadruped Climbing Robot With Obstacle-Overcoming and Manipulation Capabilities

This article proposes a versatile quadruped climbing robot (QCR) based on multidegree-of-freedom legs utilizing adhesive vacuum suckers. For the first time, the climbing robot is simultaneously endowed with climbing, omnidirectional locomotion, large obstacle overcoming, and manipulation capabilities. A prototype QCR is developed by integrating the functional components along with vision and torque sensors. The kinematic and quasi-static climbing models have been derived under different scenarios with climbing safety checks by analyzing the adhesive and surface reaction forces. For potential application on the glass façade of high-rise buildings that are slippery and often full of prominent structures, a forward crawling gait and an omnidirectional climbing gait are planned to overcome the obstacles. A comprehensive torque controller is proposed for locomotion. The concept of the leg-transformed manipulator is introduced to accomplish the manipulation tasks under visual guidance. The robot's performance has been verified by performing several experiments in adhesion, crawling, visual-guided manipulation, and climbing. Results reveal that the developed QCR can stably climb, overcome obstacles, and perform manipulation on surfaces with different inclination angles and obstacles.

Multimode Grasping Soft Gripper Achieved by Layer Jamming Structure and Tendon-Driven Mechanism.

Robotic grasping has become increasingly important in many application areas such as industrial manufacturing and logistics. Because of the diversity and uncertainty of objects and environments, common grippers with one single grasping mode face difficulties to fulfill all the tasks. Hence, we proposed a soft gripper with multiple grasping modes in this study. The gripper consists of four modular soft fingers integrated with layer jamming structure and tendon-driven mechanism. Each finger's rotating shaft of the base uses a torsional spring to decouple the bending deformation and relative rotation. An octopus-mimicking vacuum sucker is installed in the fingertip to generate suction. The effectiveness of the bending deformation and variable stiffness of the design were proved by finite element simulation. Thus, the control model of the finger was built, and the control strategy of multimode grasping of the gripper was proposed. Three control modes were designed to realize the four anthropomorphic grasping modes, including wrap, pinch, hook, and suck. Furthermore, the grasping performance was evaluated to show the abilities. The experiments indicated the superior performance of the proposed gripper and the multimode grasping ability that satisfies various grasping tasks.

The finite element analysis of concrete pipe pile vacuum sucker

The adhesion degree between the vacuum sucker and the surface of the adsorbed object seriously affects its adsorption performance. In order to solve the problem that the curved surface of cylindrical concrete pipe pile is not easy to be adsorbed, an elliptical vacuum sucker is designed. In order to study the influence of different unadsorbed areas on the adsorption force, the flow field inside the vacuum sucker is simulated and analysed by using computational fluid dynamics software (fluent). The corresponding curve between the unadsorbed area of the sucker and its adsorption force is obtained. According to the relationship, through the analysis of the size of the unconnected area of the vacuum sucker, it can be known whether the adsorption capacity of vacuum sucker meet the working requirements of the vacuum sucker adsorption cylindrical concrete pipe pile.

Design on the Inner Wall Crawling and Inspecting Robot for Offshore Platform Leg

Background: The legs are important base mechanism and have a key effect on the stability and security of movable offshore platform. In the application field, the work of defects detection is operated in a manual way for offshore platform leg. The main disadvantages of manual inspection can be summarized as follows: high detection cost and risk, low detection coverage and efficiency, etc. Objective: To develop a robot with an inspecting system that can crawl on the inner wall surface of the offshore platform leg, and inspect the surface defects through the inspecting system. Methods: Based on our patented technologies and the application requirements, the telescopic mechanisms, constituted by motor-screw-nut mechanism, are applied to design the body and legs mechanism of the robot. The vacuum sucker groups are applied to design the adsorption mechanism of the robot. The PLC is applied to design the measurement and movement control system. The laser ranging sensors are applied to realize the function of obstacle detection, robot location and pose analysis. The camera and its driving system are applied to design the image acquisition system. The wireless bridge is applied to design the message remote transmission system. Results: Based on the structure characteristic and the defect inspecting requirement of offshore platform leg, the wall crawling robot and its inspecting system are designed in this study. Conclusion: A series of experiments show that the robot and its inspecting system meet the demand of field applications.

Design of a Vacuum Adsorption Wall Climbing Robot

In this paper, a new type of wall climbing robot with multi vacuum suckers is developed. The robot structure and working principle are introduced in detail. The analysis of safe adsorption force of the wall climbing robot. The mechanical model of the suckers is established. The adsorption force of the suckers is determined based on the experiments. The robot prototype is made. And a large number of experiments are carried out to verify the feasibility of the wall climbing robot. The experiments include robot wall adaptability test and maximum load capacity test, and all. The experiments result show that the prototype can walk on the vertical wall of various materials. The experiment results of the prototype walking on the vertical steel plate surface show that the maximum load is 13kg. And can span 20x8mm cracks.

Pneumatically Attachable Flexible Rails for Track-Guided Ultrasound Scanning in Robotic-Assisted Partial Nephrectomy—A Preliminary Design Study

Robotic-assisted partial nephrectomy is a surgical operation in which part of a kidney is removed typically because of the presence of a mass. Pre-operative and intraoperative imaging techniques are used to identify and outline the target mass, thus the margins of the resection area on the kidney surface. Drop-in ultrasound probes are used to acquire intraoperative images: the probe is inserted through a trocar port, grasped with a robotic-assisted laparoscopic gripper and swiped on the kidney surface. Multiple swipes are performed to define the resection area. This is marked swipe by swipe using an electrocautery tool. During this procedure the probe often requires repositioning because of slippage from the target organ surface. Furthermore, the localization can be inaccurate when the target mass is in locations particularly hard to reach, and thus kidney repositioning could be required. A highly skilled surgeon is typically required to successfully perform this pre-operatory procedure. We propose a novel approach for the navigation of drop-in ultrasound probes: the use of pneumatically attachable flexible rails to enable swift, effortless, and accurate track-guided scanning of the kidney. The proposed system attaches on the kidney side surface with the use of a series of bio-inspired vacuum suckers. In this letter, the design of the proposed system and its use in robotic-assisted partial nephrectomy are presented for the first time.

Experimental investigation on climbing robot using rotation-flow adsorption unit

Traditional climbing robots that use vacuum suckers have some technical problems, e.g., inability to climb coarse walls, frictional resistance and abrasion of suckers, and poor obstacle-surmounting ability. In this study, a new negative pressure adsorption mechanism is applied to the design of a climbing robot. This mechanism generates and maintains negative pressure and adsorption force by using the air’s rotational inertia effect; therefore, the structure incorporating this mechanism is called the rotational-flow adsorption unit. The most important characteristic of the adsorption unit is that it can function without being in contact with the wall, which fundamentally solves these technical problems associated with traditional climbing robots. In this study, we designed a square-shaped rotational-flow adsorption unit to improve the robot’s load ability (18% increase in the adsorption force) and designed a soft skirt structure to improve the robot’s obstacle-surmounting ability (e.g., passing through 15-mm-high bulges). Finally, we fabricated a prototype of the climbing robot and tested it on several actual walls (extremely coarse wall, wall containing deep groove, and wall containing large bulges). The test results show that our prototype robot can move stably on coarse walls and can pass over large grooves and bulges easily.

Pipelined Soft Packaging Cargoes Handling Robot

In order to solve the problem of packing and packing on the soft package in the pipeline, we use PLC system to control the robot. The step motor and the push rod motor cooperate with each other to realize the space movement. The vacuum sucker can firmly absorb the target and realize the transportation and packing of the target. To solve the problem of heavy workload of the soft packing line, wasting the manpower and material resources, we change the past hard grab transport mode and use the vacuum sucker to absorb the soft package to improve the packing efficiency. As for transporting soft package goods, the vacuum sucker has characteristics of small wear, fast speed, light and convenience. PLC control system greatly improves the accuracy of its moving objects, the robot is more efficient and practical.

UVGを用いた壁面および天井面への吸着型マルチコプタの開発

The deteriorations of the social infrastructures such as the bridges become a serious problem. Therefore, the inspections of the infrastructures are necessary. Because of the dangerousness of these inspections carried out in high place, inspection robots based on multirotor with image inspection and hammering test are widely developed. However, it is difficult to carry out the two tests in a multirotor. Thus, the multirotors with adsorption mechanism to wall surface have been proposed based on two ideas; vacuum sucker or claw. However, multirotor using vacuum sucker can adsorb only a flat wall, and multirotor using claw can adsorb only wall having a step. In this research, we focused on one of the vacuum sucker, called Universal Vacuum Gripper, in short UVG. UVG is vacuum sucker adsorb to uneven surface with deformable skirt. In this paper, we propose three multirotors based on UVG which adsorb vertical wall and ceiling. Here, we report the performance of the wall surface and ceiling adsorption by the multirotors.

Universal Vacuum Gripper の形状及び材質に関する性能評価

Gripping and holding of objects are key tasks for robotic manipulators. However, the multifingered hand introduces hardware and software complexities. In recent years, the soft robotic gripper called Universal Gripper is widely focused. UG is the robot hand using jamming effect of ground coffee inside a balloon to grip the material with uneven surface. The operating principle is the ability of granular materials to transition between an unjammed, deformable state and a jammed state with solid-like rigidity. We developed the vacuum sucker called Universal Vacuum Gripper with deformable skirt based on UG. One of the advantage of the UVG compared with traditional sucker is the ability to adsorb the uneven surface, not only the flat surface. However, it remains to be elucidated whether filling rate of granular material could affect the performance of UVG. In this research, we study the relation between performance of UVG and filling rate of granular material. Here we found that the best filling rate is about 50% to avoid the airleak. We also evaluate the hardness of UG depends on the compression method.

Design of Structure and Drive System for Pneumatic Glass Curtain Wall Cleaning Robot

In order to improve the cleaning efficiency of curtain wall, a pneumatic robot is designed. The robot is consists of mobile system, adsorption system and cleaning system. The mobile system is a cross-shaped framework that is driven by the pneumatic system and moves mutually. Vacuum sucker scheme is adopted in the adsorption system. Cleaning brush is driven directly backward and forward by the cylinder. The adsorption and detachment of robot feet sucker, body movement and sequence control of the robot cleaning task are controlled by the PLC. The function that robot can clean glass curtain wall efficiently by the harmony operation is achieved.

Design on Magnetic Gap Adhesion Typed Crawler

The core technology of heavy-duty attaching robot,applied in large scale steel surface preparation(ships surface rust removal,large storage tank surface paint removal),is the attaching effect which means attach reliably and move neatly.The traditional attaching robot has two kinds of attaching modes: vacuum sucker mode(invalid for heavy-duty) and magnet crawler mode(inflexible move).The magnetic gap adhesion typed crawler combines two kinds of attaching modes to enhance the attaching ability of robot.The magnet gap mode will separate the magnet from the crawler,and the magnet is installed separately which dose not contact the surface,and the attaching ability can be adjusted though changing the gap.The magnetic gap adhesion typed crawler's own weight is about 75 kg,and carries dozens meters of ultra-high pressure hoses and vacuum pipes which will be filled with water during work.It is applied in ships surface rust automatic removal and achieves water jet rust removal of steel surface and no re-rust.The design principle,stress analysis,magnet gap effect and industry test are introduced.The application shows that the magnet gap mode attaching robot can achieve heavy-duty work,move neatly,reliable attaching and other requests.

2A1-E11 吸盤振動型ポンプレス壁面移動ロボット

This paper proposes a new technique that can keep a vacuum sucker to the wall without any pump, even on a slightly leaky wall condition. By pushing and pulling cyclically, an elastic sucker can be kept attached to the wall. When the sucker is pushed, air inside is exhausted, and in every time of pulling phase, the sucker keeps its vacuum in a short time. The important character is that the impulse (product of force and time) of pulling phase can be larger than that of pushing. This means multi sucker alternate push-pull system can be realized for wall climbing. This paper also demonstrate it can make a locomotion driven by adjacent wheels with keeping suckers attached to the wall.

Effective Pneumatic Scheme and Control Strategy of a Climbing Robot for Class Wall Cleaning on High-rise Buildings

A new kind of pneumatic climbing robot is presented to meet the requirements of glass-wall cleaning for high-rise buildings, which is totally actuated by pneumatic cylinders and attached to the glass wall with vacuum suckers. Using the pneumatic actuators the climbing robot can be made lightweight and dexterous. At the same time the movement driven by pneumatic actuators has the characteristic of passive compliance. In order to solve the problems of high speed movement for the Y cylinder and precise position control of the X cylinder, the applied pneumatic schemes of X and Y cylinders are employed to drive the high-speed on-off solenoid valves and an ordinary valve to adjust the air-flow and pressure to the cylinders. Furthermore a method of segment and variable bang-bang controller is proposed to implement the accurate control of the position servo system for the X cylinder during the sideways movement. Testing results show that the novel approach can effectively improve the control quality. This cleaning robot can meet the requirements of realization.

Flutuação populacional de Diaphorina citri Kuwayama (Hemiptera: Psyllidae) em pomares de citros na região Norte do Estado de São Paulo

The purpose of this research was to study the population dynamics of Diaphorina citri Kuwayama in citrus orchards in the north area of Sao Paulo State. The study was carried out in 16 citrus orchards, being six of them in Catanduva area, five in Barretos and five in Monte Azul Paulista. A vacuum sucker machine was used to collect the insects. The highest density of D. citri occurred in the end of the spring time and in the beginning of the summer. During autumn and winter the population was low. Most of the insects were captured in the Catanduva area, followed by Barretos and Monte Azul Paulista. Population was considered constant in all the Catanduva orchards, in four orchards in Monte Azul Paulista, and in only two orchards in Barretos.