ContinuumEA: a soft continuum electroadhesive manipulator

Abstract

Soft robotic gripping technologies are highly important for pick-and-place of difficult-to-access, difficult-to-handle, and delicate materials. Electroadhesion (EA) is an electrically controllable, energy-saving, highly adaptable, and lightweight material handling technology. Current EA grippers are not able to handle objects in difficult-to-access places such as confined pipelines. We present ContinuumEA, a combination of a soft continuum arm and an EA end effector, for pick-and-place of objects in complicated environments. We embed both a camera and an EA gripper into the end effector of a multi-segment soft continuum arm to demonstrate capabilities of soft-and-safe movement, object search by visual feedback, and 3D movement and placement of objects using EA gripping. ContinuumEA has the potential to extend the gripping performance and capability of current EA grippers and increase their use in material handling applications in challenging environments.