Novel Soft Gripper With Adjustable Performance Based on Blade Flexures

Abstract

The design of soft grippers is challenging as the target objects to be handled involve a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and softness. Most grippers reported present drawbacks, e.g., complex control strategies for stiffness and force variation, inadequate adaptability to target shape variability, and complicated adaptation to manipulators, which in turn limit their implementation in applications such as harvesting. This paper presents a novel overlay soft gripper based on an assembling mechanism and passive soft structures, enabling the modification of grip size, orientation, and gripping force. This gripper can be assembled over a commercial robot-gripper taking the closing motion of this as the input to perform its closing motion. Input and output parameters are related by means of the displacement transmission mechanism which converts the closing motion of the robot-gripper into the closing motion of the overlay soft gripper. The gripping force can be modified through the change of stiffness, via adjustment of effective length using contact elements, of internal blade flexures. The displacement transmission mechanism works in two modes: as rigid-body mechanism without the contact elements and as rigid-body/flexible mechanism with the contact elements. The relationships between input and output parameters are obtained analytically for the case of rigid-body mechanism, and through finite element analysis simulations for the case of rigid-body/flexible mechanism. Relationships between input and output parameters are approximated with polynomial surfaces. Finally, physical prototypes are manufactured and assembled on their respective robot-grippers to qualitatively demonstrate their performance.