Fabric Grasping by Pulling-Driven Soft Hand with Closing-Approaching Coupling Mechanism

Abstract

This paper proposes a pulling-driven soft hand for fabric manipulation. Automatic fabric manipulation is required in various industries such as garment industry, linen supply industry, automotive parts industry, and composite manufacturing, where various fabrics with different materials, shapes, and surface properties are used. Therefore, we proposed pulling-driven soft hands to pick up various fabrics. We find that picking up a fabric on a table requires soft fingertips contacting with the fabric, large friction between fingertips and the fabric, and fingertips moving along the table to maintain the contact with the fabric. We thus introduced a closing-approaching coupling mechanism to the pulling-driven soft hand. We fabricated a prototype of the proposed soft hand to demonstrate the grasping of a single fabric and picking multiple fabrics one by one from their stack. Then, we conducted a static analysis of fabric grasping to clarify the conditions to pick up a single fabric from a fabric stack. We also experimentally verified the conditions to validate the static analysis.