Experimental analysis of soft fingertips with internal rigid core

Abstract

The paper describes an experimental activity concerning the mechanical characterization of soft fingertips for robotic hands, focusing on the effects of the presence of an inner rigid core, as in robotic fingers with an endo-skeletal articulated frame covered by an external layer of soft material. By means of a purposely-designed test equipment, fingertips with differently sized cores have been tested, showing the influence of the thickness of the compliant layer on the resultant fingertip stiffness with respect to different materials and loading conditions (pure normal load, normal and tangential load, normal load and torque)