Passively Adaptive Compliant Gripper

Abstract

Gripping and holding of objects are key tasks for robotic manipulators. The development of universal grippers able to pick up unfamiliar objects of widely varying shapes and surfaces is a very challenging task. Passively compliant underactuated mechanisms are one way to obtain the gripper which could accommodate to any irregular and sensitive grasping objects. The purpose of the underactuation is to use the power of one actuator to drive the open and close motion of the gripper. The underactuation can morph shapes of the gripper to accommodate to different objects. As a result, they require less complex control algorithms. The fully compliant mechanism has multiple degrees of freedom and can be considered as an underactuated mechanism. This paper presents a new design of the adaptive underactuated compliant gripper with distributed compliance and embedded sensors in the gripper structure. The adaptive gripper surfaces will have the sensing capability by these embedded sensors. The gripper will be made of a silicone rubber and conductive silicone rubber will be used for the embedded sensors. The main points of this paper are in explanation of the construction and production of the gripper structure and showing the methodology of a new sensing capability of the gripper.