A Soft-Robotic Gripper With Enhanced Object Adaptation and Grasping Reliability

A novel soft-robotic gripper design is presented, with three soft bending fingers and one passively adaptive palm. Each soft finger comprises two ellipse-profiled pneumatic chambers. Combined with the adaptive palm and the surface patterned feature, the soft gripper could achieve 40-N grasping force in practice, 10 times the self-weight, at a very low actuation pressure below 100 kPa. With novel soft finger design, the gripper could pick up small objects, as well as conform to large convex-shape objects with reliable contact. The fabrication process was presented in detail, involving commercial-grade three-dimensional printing and molding of silicone rubber. The fabricated actuators and gripper were tested on a dedicated platform, showing the gripper could reliably grasp objects of various shapes and sizes, even with external disturbances.