Design and analysis of underactuated robotic gripper with adaptive fingers for objects grasping tasks

Abstract

The ability of the underactuated adaptive gripper is to envelop the objects according to its geometric shapes. It is known that robotic grippers are a nonlinear system, and it is difficult to set up an appropriate mathematical model, so it is hard to execute a precise control. In this paper, an underactuated gripper with two adaptive fingers is presented, and a Copley servo controller (Accelnet Micro Panel, Copley Corp) is applied to the gripper for controlling its input displacement. In order to adaption and simplification of the gripper, an adaptive finger mechanism is proposed in this paper. An underactuated gripper with two adaptive fingers with the underactuated structure is designed. There are three degrees of freedom in each finger with only one motor to drive it. The performance analysis and grasping experiments present that the proposed underactuated gripper has the capacity of enveloping objects with different shapes and sizes, and it can achieve the power grasp and precision grasp like a human hand.