Design of a Versatile Soft Pneumatic Gripper

Conventional robotic grippers are rigid mechanisms that use suction for grasping objects and are often not used in areas like the food/agriculture industries due to the highly varying sizes, shapes, and weights of the objects which should be handled by them. Since they are designed for specific use cases which are often well-known in advance they are not designed to handle requirements like fragility, deformity, etc. Soft robotic grippers are a solution to this. With the increase in human-robot interactions and increased usage of co-bots, the need for soft robotic grippers is also growing. but often they too are designed for specific needs only. This paper discusses the design of a soft pneumatic gripper with a variable fixture, which can change the grasping workspace area accordingly to make the gripper more versatile. This will enable the gripper to be used in various situations where a traditional gripper requires manual/automated end-effector swap. The finite element analysis of the soft pneumatic actuator and the structure is performed and the parts are fabricated. The bending action of the soft pneumatic actuator is evaluated.