食品ハンドリング用ソフトロボットハンド

抄録

This paper describes soft robotic hands for handling of food materials. Recently, the food industry required automatic handling of food materials to cope with labor shortage and to reduce contagion risk. Despite this requirement, it is still difficult to perform automatic handling of food materials. This difficulty originates from large variances of shapes and dimensions and uncertainty in positioning of food materials. One solution to automate food handling given the large variations in shapes, dimensions, and positioning is to introduce soft materials into robotic hands. Soft materials, acting as a physical interface between robotic hands and food materials, are effective in dealing with these variations. In this paper, we introduce soft robotic hands including wrapping grippers, circular shell grippers, planar shell grippers, binding hands, scooping-binding hands, and needle grippers, which are designed and developed for handling of food materials.