Grasping Strategy of Soft Objects by Passively Deformable Soft Finger

Abstract

In the current agricultural and food industry, automation of various works by robots is very popular. Robots are required to grasp objects when automating the works that harvesting crops or selecting and packaging merchandises. So far mechanical hands or suction hands have been mainly used for grasping. However, they cannot grasp tender objects that are uneven in their size and shape without damage. SUNBIT Inc. succeeded in grasping Momen-Dofu by using their original control method of hand and passively deformable soft fingers which were proposed by Yamamoto et al. However, the hand cannot hold the object when it moves rapidly because the control method is not considered the dynamic influences. This paper proposes the control method of hand which makes holding the objects possible by considering the dynamic influences of the fingers and the object. To confirm the effect, the results of experiments applying the control method to the hand are shown.