Design and Development of an Adaptive Robotic Gripper

In this paper, the design and development of an adaptive gripper are presented. Adaptive grippers are useful for grasping objects of varied geometric shapes by wrapping fingers around the object. The finger closing sequence in adaptive grippers may lead to ejection of the object from the gripper due to any unbalanced grasping force and such grasp failure is common for lightweight objects. Designing of the proposed gripper is focused on ensuring a stable grasp on a wide variety of objects, especially, lightweight objects (e.g., empty plastic bottles). The proposed actuation mechanism is based on movable pulleys and tendon wires which ensure that once a link stops moving, the other links continue to move and wrap around the object. Further, optimisation is used to improve the design of the adaptive gripper and the optimised gripper has been developed using 3D printing. Finally, validation is done by executing object grasping on common household objects using an industrial robot fitted with the developed gripper.