Design, Fabrication and Analysis of a Soft Robotic Gripper Using Fluid Elastomer Actuators

The aim of this paper is to design and develop a modular soft robotic gripper that can enable traditional robots to perform better in unstructured environments and better handle soft and delicate objects. The soft robotic gripper proposed within the paper is created by fastening three fluid elastomer actuators in a star topology. These fluid elastomer actuators are designed with the goal of developing reliable actuators. It is also required that the material used to manufacture the actuators has a high availability and is cost effective. Furthermore, the paper sets out to parameterize the performance of the presented solution through a series of tests.