Design and Characterization of a Spring Integrated Soft Hybrid Gripper

Abstract

Soft grippers and actuators have shown broad promise due to itsgoodness in unstructured environments and safe interaction with humans. However, they lacks high force output and the stability of grasping. Here, we propose a novel soft hybrid pneumatic gripper that is capable of solidly manipulatingvarious objects with different weights, sizes, shapes and textures, composed of three soft hybrid fingers (SHFs) and a palm contributed to adjustable distance between fingers. The SHF is obtained by integrating the flexible springs into soft actuator. A computational model was established in ABAQUS/CAEto analyze the finger deformation behavior and the effect of key design parameters on the bending performance of the SHF for optimizing the design parameters. A series of mechanical experiments be performed, which proved the significantly improved payload and manipulation stability for SHF. The designed soft hybrid gripper has the merits of large grasping force, high stability, allowing simple swapping of the spring and ease of fabrication. It has prospects in several applications such as fruit picking, product packaging, and manipulation of fragile objects.