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

Journal: Soft robotics
Published Date: Jun 9, 2021

Abstract

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.

Authors

  • Bin Fang
    Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Columbia University, New York, 10027, USA.
  • Fuchun Sun
    Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
  • Linyuan Wu
    Department of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.
  • Fukang Liu
    Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
  • Xiangxiang Wang
    School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, 610054, China.
  • Haiming Huang
    Department of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.
  • Wenbing Huang
    Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
  • Huaping Liu
    School of Nursing, Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China.
  • Li Wen

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