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A Fully Soft Bionic Grasping Device with the Properties of Segmental Bending Shape and Automatically Adjusting Grasping Range

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a fully Soft Bionic Grasping Device (SBGD), which has advantages in automatically adjusting the grasping range, variable stiffness, and controllable bending shape. This device consists of soft gripper structures and a soft bionic bracket structure. We adopt the local thin-walled design in the soft gripper structures. This design improves the grippers’ bending efficiency, and imitate human finger’s segmental bending function. In addition, this work also proposes a pneumatic soft bionic bracket structure, which not only can fix grippers, but also can automatically adjust the grasping space by imitating the human adjacent fingers’ opening and closing movements. Due to the above advantages, the SBGD can grasp larger or smaller objects than the regular grasping devices. Particularly, to grasp small objects reliably, we further present a new Pinching Grasping (PG) method. The great performance of the fully SBGD is verified by experiments. This work will promote innovative development of the soft bionic grasping robots, and greatly meet the applications of dexterous grasping multi-size and multi-shape objects.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors whose insightful comments and valuable suggestions are crucial to the improvement of the manuscript. The authors would like to thank Professor Li Wen of Beihang University, for his careful revising the early version of this manuscript.

Funding

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 62073305, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China University of Geosciences(Wuhan)(Nos. CUG170610 and CUGGC02).

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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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Correspondence to Xiaofeng Zong.

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The authors declare that all data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article.

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Gai, L., Zong, X. A Fully Soft Bionic Grasping Device with the Properties of Segmental Bending Shape and Automatically Adjusting Grasping Range. J Bionic Eng 19, 1334–1348 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42235-022-00209-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42235-022-00209-w

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