Development of minimal grasper: Preliminary result of a simple and flexible enveloping grasper

In this paper, we propose a new design of a flexible enveloping grasper for pick and place tasks with the low complexity in manipulation and task planning for the purpose of practical use in the near future. Flexible material for the grasper has many advantageous characteristics inherently including robustness against manipulation errors and the ability to increase contact area with a grasped object and the grasping force. Compliance of the grasper material also contributes to reduction in complexity of the processes such as the force control, sensor-motor coordination, and manipulation by self-adaptation. Two properties, flexibility and compliance, mentioned above help the proposed grasper minimize the internal forces in a passive manner and achieve the successful force distribution with self-adaptivity when performing enveloping grasping. In order to demonstrate our work, we have constructed 2 different prototypes of flexible enveloping grasper. Experimental results validate robust performances of the proposed grasper.