Design of a sensor integrated adaptive gripper

Abstract: In this paper, design and development of a sensor integrated adaptive gripper is presented. Adaptive grippers are useful for grasping objects of varied geometric shapes by wrapping fingers around the object. The finger closing sequence in adaptive grippers may lead to ejection of the object from the gripper due to any unbalanced grasping force and such grasp failure is common for lightweight objects. Designing of the proposed gripper is focused on ensuring stable grasp on a wide variety of objects, especially, for lightweight objects (e.g., empty plastic bottles). The actuation mechanism is based on movable pulleys and tendon wires which ensure that once a link stops moving, the other links continue to move and wrap around the object. Further, optimisation is used to improve the design of the adaptive gripper. Finally, validation is done by executing object grasping in a simulated environment PyBullet for simple pick and place tasks on common household objects.