Development of Universal Gripper with Optical Sensing and Acquisition of Tactile Information

Abstract

The universal gripper has attracted attention due to its simple structure and advanced grasping ability of irregularly shaped objects. In this research, we propose a novel design for a granular-jamming-based gripper, which uses a transparent filling and semi-transparent membrane to perform optical sensing to detect both the deformation and the object that is being grasped. By adjusting the refractive index of an oil mixture to the refractive index of the granular bodies, we achieve a fully transparent filling that allows the use of a camera inside the universal gripper. We present the materials and development of our prototype and confirm experimentally that it can successfully acquire tactile information.