Design of a soft gripper with compliant mechanisms

Abstract

Robotic manipulators can perform repetitive tasks at rates and accuracies that cannot be rivalled by those of human operators. Nowadays, they are rather ubiqitiuos and widely used in different fields. However, that is not all. Robotic manipulators have slowly started to incursion in fields other than manufacturing like that of medicine and agriculture. Because of the wide variety of fields that currently employ robotic manipulators, tasks can be more complex than the usual ones. For this reason, traditional mechanical grippers are not always adequate and there is currently a high demand for grippers that can effectively adapt to grasp a wider variety of objects – especially those that aree fragile or deformable – without damaging them. Current grippers are mostly made of mechanical linkages what makes them stiff and non-adaptive, which is a disadvantage when attempting to grasp delicate objects. Soft grippers can be an adequate solution for this problem and have gained attention in recent years. Although some models have been presented in the literature, they have several drawbacks. This work presents the design of a novel soft gripper that can adapt to the shape of the object. Experiments were conducted to validate the proposal.