Universal Vacuum Gripper の形状及び材質に関する性能評価

抄録

Gripping and holding of objects are key tasks for robotic manipulators. However, the multifingered hand introduces hardware and software complexities. In recent years, the soft robotic gripper called Universal Gripper is widely focused. UG is the robot hand using jamming effect of ground coffee inside a balloon to grip the material with uneven surface. The operating principle is the ability of granular materials to transition between an unjammed, deformable state and a jammed state with solid-like rigidity. We developed the vacuum sucker called Universal Vacuum Gripper with deformable skirt based on UG. One of the advantage of the UVG compared with traditional sucker is the ability to adsorb the uneven surface, not only the flat surface. However, it remains to be elucidated whether filling rate of granular material could affect the performance of UVG. In this research, we study the relation between performance of UVG and filling rate of granular material. Here we found that the best filling rate is about 50% to avoid the airleak. We also evaluate the hardness of UG depends on the compression method.