A novel soft gripper with enhanced gripping adaptability based on spring-reinforced soft pneumatic actuators

Abstract

Purpose

Soft grippers have safer and more adaptable human–machine and environment–machine interactions than rigid grippers. However, most soft grippers with single gripping postures have a limited gripping range. Therefore, this paper aims to design a soft gripper with variable gripping posture to enhance the gripping adaptability.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper proposes a novel soft gripper consisting of a conversion mechanism and four spring-reinforced soft pneumatic actuators (SSPAs) as soft fingers. By adjusting the conversion mechanism, four gripping postures can be achieved to grip objects of different shapes, sizes and weights. Furthermore, a quasi-static model is established to predict the bending deformation of the finger. Finally, the bending angle of the finger is measured to validate the accuracy of the quasi-static model. The gripping force and gripping adaptability are tested to explore the gripping performance of the gripper.

Findings

Through experiments, the results have shown that the quasi-static model can accurately predict the deformation of the finger; the gripper has the most significant gripping force under the parallel posture, and the gripping adaptability of the gripper is highly enhanced by converting the four gripping postures.

Originality/value

By increasing the gripping posture, a novel soft gripper with enhanced gripping adaptability is proposed to enlarge the gripping range of the soft gripper with a single posture. Furthermore, a quasi-static model is established to analyze the deformation of SSPA.

Citation

Cheng, P., Ye, Y., Yan, B., Lu, Y. and Wu, C. (2023), "A novel soft gripper with enhanced gripping adaptability based on spring-reinforced soft pneumatic actuators", Industrial Robot, Vol. 50 No. 4, pp. 595-608. https://doi.org/10.1108/IR-04-2022-0103