Publication: Universal soft robotic gripper
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Date
2023-08
Authors
Ahmad Nur Hakim bin Mohd Sallehudin
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Abstract
The design of robotic gripper in robotic depend on its task specified and the variation of products handed by the robotic arm may led to heavy customization of itself. This resulted in multiple of end effectors to cater wide range of products. A single robot arm that performs pick and place various objects with varying shape, form and geometry require many grippers to cater to all product it handles. The approach of having multiple end effectors introduced complexity, additional cost and downtime for the end effector changes during product production changes. Thus, the end effector needed to be redesigned to reduce or eliminate the issue by making one gripper that can be use universally for gripping various shapes and form. One way to achieve this idea on mind was to use the application of soft material for the fabrication of the gripper. One strong point of soft material as it can be manipulated to change form and extend its length. Hence, the objective of the project was to design universal soft robotic gripper, fabricating it using suitable soft material and to test its capability and effectiveness of gripping various object types, shapes, and size. The result of the fabricated soft gripper’s finger was its pressure exerted during the grip during material selection. The material selected was Smooth Sil 960 for the silicone finger as it possessed higher pressure exerted during gripping test. Moreover, the material used proved to be better that withstanding higher pressure when pressurized air applied to its cavity. Another test conducted was the gripper able
to perform gripping, hold and release different shape and sizes of the object being picked. Even though the gripper failed to grip some of objects required, it proved that the gripper able to perform picking object with different shape and morphology. The conclusion for the project was the universal soft robotic gripper able to grip various morphology and some future improvement needed to be done for the gripper to grip more effectively.