Soft Robotic Hand for Sushi Grasping and Handling

In this research, a soft robotic hand design was proposed for handling food products, specifically for making and transferring sushi, nigiri, or gunkan. The PneuNet-based design of fingers is made from silicon to minimize damaging the sushi upon grasping. For placing a raw fish slice on top of the rice of a nigiri efficiently, a suction hole was added onto the palm. To ensure safe contact between the robot palm and the sushi for gentle and smooth grasping, picking, and handling, a distance sensors was also installed at the palm area. Thanks to such technical features, the sushi is not deformable or damaged for the best quality. To prove the effectiveness of our soft robotic hand design, a series of experiments were conducted with eight different types of nigiri and sushi. The results show that overall successful rate of grasping is over 90 percentages, which is potential for real-world applications, not only with sushi but also other types of soft and fragile products.