Design, Modelling and Analysis of Soft Gripper for Material Handling

Abstract

Soft robots have many attractive features compared to their hard counterparts, developing tractable models for these highly deformable nonlinear systems is challenging. A novel soft-robotic gripper design is presented with three soft bending fingers and one passively adaptive palm. The material selected for palm is hard material (grey cast iron) and for finger is soft material (silicone rubber). Each soft finger comprises three pneumatic chambers to make bending action. With novel soft finger design, the gripper could pick up small objects, as well as conform to large shaped objects with reliable contact using positive and negative air pressures. The design, analysis and control operations are presented in detail. There are two different software's used here for performing the above processes. The design and analysis are carried out in SOLIDWORKS software. The modelled gripper could reliably grasp objects of various shapes and sizes, even with external disturbances.