Distributed design of passive particle jamming based soft grippers

Abstract

In soft bending gripper design, the concept of passive particle jamming can play an important role in improving certain properties of the gripper. It has been proved that its stiffness could exhibit six-fold change through varying air pressure. However, the integral design of a particle sac has negative effect on grippers' compliance, limiting its broader applications. Since passive particle jamming does not need any dedicated actuation and control, its design into a soft bending actuator allows more variations. This paper proposes a distributed design of passive particle jamming soft gripper, which can increase the bending angle of an integral passive particle jamming gripper from 50° to 76°, while roughly maintaining the gripper's rotational stiffness and maximum pull-out forces. The proposed gripper design is 3D printed using an elastomer material and filled with particles manually. Given the simple design and fabrication process, together with improved grasping compliance, it is expected that this research will stimulate more interest in exploring novel applications of passive particle jamming in soft robot design and development.