1. Adaptive Self-Sealing Suction-Based Soft Robotic Gripper.
- Author
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Song S, Drotlef DM, Son D, Koivikko A, and Sitti M
- Subjects
- Elastic Modulus, Hand Strength, Suction, Equipment Design methods, Mechanical Phenomena, Robotics instrumentation, Robotics methods
- Abstract
While suction cups prevail as common gripping tools for a wide range of real-world parts and surfaces, they often fail to seal the contact interface when engaging with irregular shapes and textured surfaces. In this work, the authors propose a suction-based soft robotic gripper where suction is created inside a self-sealing, highly conformable and thin flat elastic membrane contacting a given part surface. Such soft gripper can self-adapt the size of its effective suction area with respect to the applied load. The elastomeric membrane covering edge of the soft gripper can develop an air-tight self-sealing with parts even smaller than the gripper diameter. Such gripper shows 4 times higher adhesion than the one without the membrane on various textured surfaces. The two major advantages, underactuated self-adaptability and enhanced suction performance, allow the membrane-based suction mechanism to grip various three-dimensional (3D) geometries and delicate parts, such as egg, lime, apple, and even hydrogels without noticeable damage, which can have not been gripped with the previous adhesive microstructures-based and active suction-based soft grippers. The structural and material simplicity of the proposed soft gripper design can have a broad use in diverse fields, such as digital manufacturing, robotic manipulation, transfer printing, and medical gripping., (© 2021 The Authors. Advanced Science published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.)
- Published
- 2021
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