Closed structure soft robotic gripper

Abstract

This work describes a new kind of soft gripper. Inspiration on nature is usual in Soft Robotics device creation. In this case, the inspiration came from a sea lamprey in order to create a closed structure soft robotic gripper. Usually the grippers have one or more soft actuators that act like fingers. Since it is difficult to know whether the fingers are really grasping an object, it is being proposed a closed structure to deal with this problem. While the proposed gripper involves the object as whole, a homogeneous force is applied on it. In addition to the details of the closed structure actuator manufacture description, two procedure tests are presented: an analysis of load versus pressure function and of the force versus pressure characteristics. At the end, some new research topics to the proposed soft gripper are discussed.