Design and Analysis of a Soft-Robotic Finger for Grasping Agricultural Products

Automation in the field of handling agricultural produce is a need of the hour. Some agricultural products such as fruits and vegetables are required to be grasped in a delicate manner without any damage to the produce or crop which rigid robotic grippers cannot offer. Soft robotics is an emerging area of research. In this paper, we present a design of a finger for the manufacturing of a soft gripper for handling small objects such as grapes, coffee cherries, etc. We present the analysis done for the selection of the material for the manufacturing of the gripper, material characterization, and the use of the insights from material characterization for the FEM analysis of the designed model. We also prototype the finger using a carefully designed manufacturing process and compare the performance of the prototype with the FEM analysis. We believe that this work provides insights into the various stages of design of soft- fingers including material characterization, FEM analysis and prototyping.