Development of a new type of passively adaptive compliant gripper

Abstract

Purpose

Passively compliant underactuated mechanisms are one way to obtain the gripper which could accommodate to any irregular and sensitive grasping object. The purpose of the underactuation is to use less active inputs than the number of degrees of freedom of the gripper mechanism to drive the open and close motion of the gripper. Another purpose of underaction is to reduce the number of control variables.

Design/methodology/approach

The underactuation can morph shapes of the gripper to accommodate different objects. As a result, the underactuated grippers require less complex control algorithms. The fully compliant mechanism has multiple degrees of freedom and can be considered as an underactuated mechanism.

Findings

This paper presents a new design of the adaptive underactuated compliant gripper with distributed compliance. The optimal topology of the gripper structure was obtained by optimality criteria method using mathematical programming technique. Afterwards, the obtained model was improved by iterative finite element optimization procedure. The gripper was constructed entirely of silicon rubber.

Originality/value

The main points of this paper are the explanation of the development and production of the new compliant gripper structure.

Citation

Petković, D., D. Pavlović, N., Shamshirband, S. and Badrul Anuar, N. (2013), "Development of a new type of passively adaptive compliant gripper", Industrial Robot, Vol. 40 No. 6, pp. 610-623. https://doi.org/10.1108/IR-12-2012-452