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Optimizing Out-of-Plane Stiffness for Soft Grippers

Authors :
Renbo Su
Yingjun Tian
Mingwei Du
Charlie C. L. Wang
Source :
Su, R, Tian, Y, Du, M & Wang, C C L 2022, ' Optimizing Out-of-Plane Stiffness for Soft Grippers ', IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 10430-10437 . https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2022.3193487
Publication Year :
2022

Abstract

In this letter, we presented a data-driven framework to optimize the out-of-plane stiffness for soft grippers to achieve mechanical properties as hard-to-twist and easy-to-bend. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated in the design of a soft pneumatic bending actuator (SPBA). First, a new objective function is defined to quantitatively evaluate the out-of-plane stiffness as well as the bending performance. Then, sensitivity analysis is conducted on the parametric model of an SPBA design to determine the optimized design parameters with the help of Finite Element Analysis (FEA). To enable the computation of numerical optimization, a data-driven approach is employed to learn a cost function that directly represents the out-of-plane stiffness as a differentiable function of the design variables. A gradient-based method is used to maximize the out-of-plane stiffness of the SPBA while ensuring specific bending performance. The effectiveness of our method has been demonstrated in physical experiments taken on 3D-printed grippers.

Details

Language :
English
Database :
OpenAIRE
Journal :
Su, R, Tian, Y, Du, M & Wang, C C L 2022, ' Optimizing Out-of-Plane Stiffness for Soft Grippers ', IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 10430-10437 . https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2022.3193487
Accession number :
edsair.doi.dedup.....4a5704d54242d28708c604f21454a728
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2022.3193487