Design and Experiment of a Soft Gripper Based on Cable-Driven Continuum Structures

Soft grippers can be used as the end effectors of robots due to their good adaptability to the object being grasped. This is because of the passive compliance of the material. However, for this reason, the grippers have difficulties applying enough forces to the objects. Therefore, how to design the grippers to realize universal adaptive and compliant grasping of the object is worthy of study. In this paper, we design a novel cable-driven soft gripper, the shape and function of which are similar to a human hand. It is able to realize a stable self-adaptive grasp. Kinematic and kinetic models of the finger are established, simulation analysis and finite element analysis are carried out to optimize the finger. Experimental validation proves that the gripper designed can realize stable self-adaptive grasping.