Rotary robotic gripper with LiDAR-tactile sensor fusion

Abstract

Robotic grippers combined with visual-touch sensor fusion have been widely used in the manufacturing industry. However, due to limited control of the force applied to the mechanical gripper, it is hard to achieve stable object grasping. Therefore, to control the force of gripping objects, we propose a robotic rotary gripper fused with light detection and ranging (LiDAR)-tactile. We use LiDAR to obtain distance information and fiber Bragg grating as the tactile sensor for force feedback. In order to ensure the low-loss transmission of the optical signal in the rotation process, the fiber optic rotary joint is employed and assembled into the system. Finally, the experimental results show that our proposed system can achieve a stable grasp of objects with different shapes by precisely controlling the force, which can meet the demands for precise robotic grasping and fast manipulation.