Soft grippers research is gaining increasing attention for their flexibility.However,the conventional soft gripper primar-ily focuses on soft fingers,without considering the palm.This makes grasping forces concentrate...Soft grippers research is gaining increasing attention for their flexibility.However,the conventional soft gripper primar-ily focuses on soft fingers,without considering the palm.This makes grasping forces concentrated in the fingertip areas,resulting in objects being prone to damage and instability during handling,especially for delicate items.Additionally,pre-transportation classification faces challenges:tactile methods are complex,visual methods are environment-sensitive,and both struggle with similar objects.To address these problems,inspired by the human hand's transition between finger grasp and palm support and the lotus's hierarchical structure,this paper proposes a dual-layer gripper,named IOSGrip-per.It features four pneumatic soft fingers and a rotational soft-rigid palm.Through coordinated control of the fingers and palm,it transitions concentrated fingertip squeeze force to distributed palm support force,reducing squeeze force and squeeze duration.Moreover,it integrates a range sensor and four load cells,enabling stable and accurate measurements of the object's height and weight.Furthermore,a classifier is developed based on K-nearest neighbor algorithm,allowing real-time object classification.Experiments demonstrate that compared to only using soft fingers,the IOSGripper signifi-cantly reduces the squeeze force on the objects(with 0 N squeeze force during palm support)and damage on the delicate object,while improving grasping stability.Its height and weight measurement errors are within 2 mm and 1 g,respectively.And it achieves high accuracy in three test scenarios,including classifying similar objects.This study provides useful insights for the design of soft grippers capable of human-like grasping and sorting tasks.展开更多
This paper presents an untethered pneumatic soft robot which can crawl both in horizontal and vertical pipes with different sizes and cross sections.This robot uses modular origami inspired soft-rigid hybrid actuator ...This paper presents an untethered pneumatic soft robot which can crawl both in horizontal and vertical pipes with different sizes and cross sections.This robot uses modular origami inspired soft-rigid hybrid actuator to produce telescoping and anchoring movements powered by vacuum pressure.The introduction of grooves to valley crease significantly lowers the full contraction vacuum pressure and improves the response,allowing the system can be driven by an onboard micro vacuum pump,enabling the possibility of miniaturization,integration,and untethered operation of the robot.A series of crawling experiments in pipes with different sizes and cross sections constructed by acrylic are conducted to validate the crawling performance of the robot.Within square cross-section pipes,the robot can achieve a velocity of 9.4 mm/s in horizontal crawling and 7.7 mm/s in vertical upward crawling.For horizontal crawling in circular pipes,it can reach a velocity of 8.0 mm/s.When fully charged,the robot can crawl for 40 min with a mileage of 16.649 m,which is sufficient for most drainage and industrial pipelines detection tasks.The robot demonstrates excellent endurance and speed performance that exceed most existing untethered soft pipe crawling robots.展开更多
Continuously increasing applications of robot technologies in unstructured environments put higher requirements on the robotic grippers'performance,such as interaction capability,output force range,and controllabi...Continuously increasing applications of robot technologies in unstructured environments put higher requirements on the robotic grippers'performance,such as interaction capability,output force range,and controllability.However,currently,it is hard for either rigid or soft grippers to meet these requirements,as single soft or rigid structures alone are difficult to effectively overcome/alleviate their inherent defects,e.g.,low compliance of rigid structures and low output force of soft structures.To deal with these difficulties,soft-rigid coupling grippers,or hybrid grippers are proposed.Technically,the soft-rigid coupling is a promising design that combines soft and rigid structures,in order to exploit their respective advantages,such as the strength of rigid structures and compliance of soft structures,in the same set of the gripper system.For the first time,herein,this paper systematically discusses the collaboration strategies of the existing hybrid robotic grippers,by classifying them as Rigid-activesoft-passive,Rigid-passive-soft-active,and Rigid-active-soft-active.At the same time,we introduce the integrated fabrication methods of hybrid grippers,through which the soft and rigid structures with great stiffness and property differences can be coupled together to construct a stable system.Also,possible performance improvements on soft-rigid coupling design for gripper systems are discussed.展开更多
基金the Major research program of national natural science foundation of China(91848206).
文摘Soft grippers research is gaining increasing attention for their flexibility.However,the conventional soft gripper primar-ily focuses on soft fingers,without considering the palm.This makes grasping forces concentrated in the fingertip areas,resulting in objects being prone to damage and instability during handling,especially for delicate items.Additionally,pre-transportation classification faces challenges:tactile methods are complex,visual methods are environment-sensitive,and both struggle with similar objects.To address these problems,inspired by the human hand's transition between finger grasp and palm support and the lotus's hierarchical structure,this paper proposes a dual-layer gripper,named IOSGrip-per.It features four pneumatic soft fingers and a rotational soft-rigid palm.Through coordinated control of the fingers and palm,it transitions concentrated fingertip squeeze force to distributed palm support force,reducing squeeze force and squeeze duration.Moreover,it integrates a range sensor and four load cells,enabling stable and accurate measurements of the object's height and weight.Furthermore,a classifier is developed based on K-nearest neighbor algorithm,allowing real-time object classification.Experiments demonstrate that compared to only using soft fingers,the IOSGripper signifi-cantly reduces the squeeze force on the objects(with 0 N squeeze force during palm support)and damage on the delicate object,while improving grasping stability.Its height and weight measurement errors are within 2 mm and 1 g,respectively.And it achieves high accuracy in three test scenarios,including classifying similar objects.This study provides useful insights for the design of soft grippers capable of human-like grasping and sorting tasks.
基金supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant no.52475067.
文摘This paper presents an untethered pneumatic soft robot which can crawl both in horizontal and vertical pipes with different sizes and cross sections.This robot uses modular origami inspired soft-rigid hybrid actuator to produce telescoping and anchoring movements powered by vacuum pressure.The introduction of grooves to valley crease significantly lowers the full contraction vacuum pressure and improves the response,allowing the system can be driven by an onboard micro vacuum pump,enabling the possibility of miniaturization,integration,and untethered operation of the robot.A series of crawling experiments in pipes with different sizes and cross sections constructed by acrylic are conducted to validate the crawling performance of the robot.Within square cross-section pipes,the robot can achieve a velocity of 9.4 mm/s in horizontal crawling and 7.7 mm/s in vertical upward crawling.For horizontal crawling in circular pipes,it can reach a velocity of 8.0 mm/s.When fully charged,the robot can crawl for 40 min with a mileage of 16.649 m,which is sufficient for most drainage and industrial pipelines detection tasks.The robot demonstrates excellent endurance and speed performance that exceed most existing untethered soft pipe crawling robots.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant Nos.52188102 and U1613204)。
文摘Continuously increasing applications of robot technologies in unstructured environments put higher requirements on the robotic grippers'performance,such as interaction capability,output force range,and controllability.However,currently,it is hard for either rigid or soft grippers to meet these requirements,as single soft or rigid structures alone are difficult to effectively overcome/alleviate their inherent defects,e.g.,low compliance of rigid structures and low output force of soft structures.To deal with these difficulties,soft-rigid coupling grippers,or hybrid grippers are proposed.Technically,the soft-rigid coupling is a promising design that combines soft and rigid structures,in order to exploit their respective advantages,such as the strength of rigid structures and compliance of soft structures,in the same set of the gripper system.For the first time,herein,this paper systematically discusses the collaboration strategies of the existing hybrid robotic grippers,by classifying them as Rigid-activesoft-passive,Rigid-passive-soft-active,and Rigid-active-soft-active.At the same time,we introduce the integrated fabrication methods of hybrid grippers,through which the soft and rigid structures with great stiffness and property differences can be coupled together to construct a stable system.Also,possible performance improvements on soft-rigid coupling design for gripper systems are discussed.
