Effects of material properties on soft gripper grasping forces

Abstract

In this study a cable actuated soft gripper is used to analyze the effects of finger material properties on grasping forces. The gripper design and the fabrication of soft fingers using materials of varying elastic moduli are presented. A model to predict the holding force of each gripper configuration is introduced and predictions are compared to results from grasping experiments. The experiments show a decrease in grasping force with increasing finger stiffness when normalized for the cable tension as predicted by the model.