‘New soft fabric robotic gripper is thin, flat, lightweight and can grip and retrieve various objects.’
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"Our new soft fabric gripper is thin, flat, lightweight and can grip and retrieve various objects - even from confined hollow spaces - for example, a pen inside a tube," Dr Do said.Read More..
"This device also has an enhanced real-time force sensor which is 15 times more sensitive than conventional designs and detects the grip strength required to prevent damage to objects it's handling.
"There is also a thermally-activated mechanism that can change the gripper body from flexible to stiff and vice versa, enabling it to grasp and hold objects of various shapes and weights - up to 220 times heavier than the gripper's mass."
Soft Fabric robotics
Dr Do said the researchers found inspiration in nature when designing their soft fabric gripper.
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"These animals can do this because of a combination of highly sensitive organs, sense of touch and the strength of thousands of muscles without rigid bone - for example, an elephant's trunk has up to 40,000 muscles.
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Improvement over current grippers
Dr Do said the researchers' new soft gripper was an improvement on existing designs which had disadvantages that limited their application.
"Many soft grippers are based on claws or human hand-like structures with multiple inward-bending fingers, but this makes them unsuitable to grip objects that are oddly shaped, heavy or bulky, or objects smaller or larger than the gripper's opening," he said.
"Many existing soft grippers also lack sensory feedback and adjustable stiffness capabilities, which means you can't use them with fragile objects or in confined environments.
"Our technology can grip long, slender objects and retrieve them from confined, narrow spaces, as well as hook through holes in objects to pick them up - for example, a mug handle."
The fabrication method is simple and scalable, which allowed the gripper to be easily produced at different sizes and volumes.
During testing, a gripper prototype weighing 8.2 grams could lift an object of 1.8 kilograms, while a prototype 13 centimetres long could wrap around an object with a diameter of 30 mm.
Prof. Nigel Lovell said: "We used a manufacturing process involving computerised apparel engineering and applied newly designed, highly sensitive liquid metal-based tactile sensors for detecting the grip force required.
"The gripper's flat continuum also gives it superior contact with surfaces as it wraps around an object, while increasing the holding force.
"What's more, the total heating and cooling cycle for the gripper to change structure from flexible to rigid takes less than half a minute, which is among the fastest reported so far."
Uniting robotic arms and the sense of touch
Dr Do has filed a provisional patent for the new gripper.
"We now aim to optimise the integrated materials, develop a closed-loop control algorithm, and integrate the gripper into the ends of robotic arms for gripping and manipulating objects autonomously," Dr Do said.
"If we can achieve these next steps, there will be no need to manually lift the gripper which will help for handling very large, heavy objects.
"We are also working on combining the gripper with our recently announced wearable haptic glove device, which would enable the user to remotely control the gripper while experiencing what an object feels like at the same time."
Source-Medindia
