Soft flexible gripper design, characterization and application

Abstract

This paper presents a design concept of soft flexible gripper dedicated for delicate objects manipulation. Traditional grippers are composed of rigid components and consist of finite number of discrete joints. The more joints they have the better they can adapt for the specific object. However, manipulating with fragile objects still requires precise control and some kind of measurement as well. In this paper the Authors propose soft flexible gripper that is able to adapt for the manipulated object shape without any additional computational effort nor any sensors. The gripper is made only of flexible materials such as rubber and silicone. Since the gripper lacks of any discrete joints and is actuated through smooth deformation of its body, it can take very complex shapes and thus easily adapt to the surface of grasped object. The mechanism is based on soft pneumatic actuators developed by the authors and its configuration can be easily redesigned in order to extend its application for special purposes. In this paper the design and experimental characterization of the gripper prototypes is presented. Possible applications are discussed.