Development of a Novel Mechanical Layer Jamming Cable-driven Soft Actuator for Soft Gripper System

Soft actuators have many advantages, such as flexibility and safe interaction with the environment. Despite these advantages, they still lack the stiffness to carry the high load. The layer jamming mechanism can be applied to the actuator to increase stiffness, and a vacuum can control the stiffness of the mechanism. However, the typical jamming mechanism has a risk of air leakage, and vacuums are bulky to some systems. In order to solve this problem, we have developed a novel mechanical layer jamming for the cable-driven soft actuator in this paper. Our design uses the actuator body to generate the compression force to the layer at the middle of the actuator’s body to increase the actuator’s stiffness. The result shows the effectiveness of our mechanical layer jamming in increasing the stiffness of the actuator when adding the load to the tip of the actuator. In addition, we have applied our actuator to the soft gripper system, which successfully grasped various objects and changed the stiffness of the actuator.