Underwater Suction Gripper for Object Manipulation with an Underwater Robot

Abstract

The diversity of end-effectors for manipulation enables a robot to grasp objects with various shapes. As underwater manipulation becomes more common, various types of end-effectors for underwater robots are required. In this paper, we develop an underwater suction gripper (USG) for object manipulation. By using a thruster, the suction force is easily controlled by the electric drive, and the resulting size and weight allow the proposed gripper to be installed on a robot. In the experiments, we evaluate the grasping performance of the USG quantitatively. Furthermore, we installed the USG on an actual underwater robot to perform a manipulation task. The results showed that the USG can perform the pick-and-place task in a shorter and easier grasping motion compared to a typical 2-finger gripper. The implementation code can be found here: https://github.com/kumahika/usg