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A modular four-modal soft grasping device

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Abstract

It is a key challenge for soft grasping devices to stably grasp unstructured objects with multi-size and multi-shape. The conventional single-function grippers have some limitations in grasping the above kinds of objects. This work proposes a modular four-modal soft grasping device (MFSGD), which consists of soft fingers, suction cups, soft wrapper, and other structures. It can perform a variety of grasping modes such as bending grasping mode, wrapping grasping mode, end lifting-sucking mode, and side fixed-sucking mode. It may be one of the devices with the most grasping modes at present. Moreover, the device adopts a fully modular design with different structures connected by magnets. It is not only convenient to disassemble or assemble, so as to solve the mutual interference of different modal structures problem during grasping, but also simplifies the fabrication of the multi-modal grasping device. In addition, this work matches the suitable grasping modes for objects of different shapes and sizes, and obtains the relative characteristics of the MFSGD. The proposed device can improve the ability of the grasping robots, and is expected to play an important role in economic and industrial fields.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Automation, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, 430074, China

    LingJie Gai & XiaoFeng Zong

  2. Hubei Key Laboratory of Advanced Control and Intelligent Automation for Complex Systems, Wuhan, 430074, China

    LingJie Gai & XiaoFeng Zong

  3. Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Technology for Geo-Exploration, Ministry of Education, Wuhan, 430074, China

    LingJie Gai & XiaoFeng Zong

Authors
  1. LingJie Gai
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  2. XiaoFeng Zong
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to XiaoFeng Zong.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62073305), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) (Grant Nos. CUG170610 and CUGGC02).

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Gai, L., Zong, X. A modular four-modal soft grasping device. Sci. China Technol. Sci. 65, 1845–1858 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-022-2094-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-022-2094-3

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