Assisted design of linkage‐driven adaptive soft fingers
Abstract
Purpose
Adaptive grippers are versatile end effectors that mechanically adapt their shapes to the objects they seize, allowing for soft and delicate grasps while still allowing for strong contact forces if needed and therefore they are well suited for industrial applications. The purpose of this paper is to present a software‐oriented approach to design optimal architectures of linkage‐driven adaptive (often a.k.a underactuated) fingers with three degrees of freedom.
Design/methodology/approach
The user of the software presented in this paper can design planar underactuated fingers following defined constraints. The software uses an algorithm able to compute the internal and contact forces generated, respectively, in and by the finger, it is also capable of automating the design of non‐straight links to eliminate mechanical interferences, and includes results from a topological synthesis to generate all possible architectures. The mechanisms are evaluated for many criteria such as the volume of their workspaces, stability, force isotropy, stiffness of their grasps, and compactness.
Findings
This article introduces 11 new designs of underactuated fingers for four different usages, and many of these variants are good candidates for a physical realization. One of the interesting results of this work is the recurrence of S3 variants coupled with torque amplifiers or closely resembling designs using many unrelated performance criteria.
Originality/value
This paper is the first, to the best of the authors' knowledge, to investigate the systematic design of underactuated fingers driven by linkages considering not one but dozens of mechanical architectures.
Keywords
Citation
Larouche, L. and Birglen, L. (2013), "Assisted design of linkage‐driven adaptive soft fingers", Industrial Robot, Vol. 40 No. 4, pp. 337-346. https://doi.org/10.1108/01439911311320840
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited