Design and analysis of a novel light-weight, linear actuator driven flexible PET strips robotic gripper

A robotic manipulator consists of a robotic arm and an end-effector. The function of the end-effector or robotic gripper is to allow the robotic arm to grasp and manipulate objects. The traditional hard robotic grippers are prone to poor gripping ability when grasping objects with irregular shape or in-ability to passively adjust force to delicate objects. Soft Robotic grippers were purposely designed to solve these disadvantages. In this work, a novel light weight robotic gripper based on grasping action of holding an object in between two strips of in-elastic flexible material under tensile force developed when pulled is hereby presented. Force analysis of the gripper was carried out as well as validation experiments. Analysis shows that the minimum pulling force to be exerted by the gripper on the grasping strips is directly proportional to the payload mass and the strips lengths. It is also inversely proportional to the coefficient of static friction between the payload-strips interface and the horizontal extent of the payload. Experimental results supported these observations. Moreover the predicted analytical values of gripper pulling force agreed reasonably with the empirically derived values. A proof of concept model of the gripper successfully grasps a 185g object.