Design of Flexible Gripper for Unstructured Object Manipulation

Abstract

Many studies on agricultural robots are actively underway; hence, the design and the manufacture of robot grippers for manipulating a variety of fruits are attracting attention. A flexible gripper is required for harvesting without damage because the fruit size and shape are not uniform. This study executes optimal design and analysis to determine the design parameters of a spatial flexible gripper for grasping unstructured objects. The actual gripper was manufactured through 3-D printing. The grasping motion was realized by adapting the cam structure to convert rotation by a servo motor into translation to stretch or fold the finger. The experiment result shows that each part of the finger holds the object stably without excessive bending.