Design of an additively manufactured soft ring-gripper

Abstract

Robot grippers normally are specifically built to task. When product variety increases, they need to be costly replaced, exchanged or reconfigured. This may be avoided with soft material grippers that principally may handle unforeseen geometry variations by deforming to compliantly form-fit different geometries. This work presents a soft material ring-gripper for handling window hinges. While commonly, soft grippers are made from cast silicon, the presented gripper is designed for additive manufacturing with an Inkjet 3D printer, avoiding the manual silicon casting process. The gripper design is successfully tested for maximum pressure and pressure displacement with FEM-simulation and experiments.