Binding hand for grasping fragile foods

Abstract

In recent years, the aging of society has caused a decline in the working population, which is a serious social problem. The food production industry tends to require manpower due to the high-mix low-volume production. Thus, automation of handling by robots is urgently needed to solve the serious human power shortage. In particular, foods with fragile characteristics, such as marine products, are considered to be difficult to grasp. Therefore, this paper proposes a method for stable grasping of fragile objects. We fabricated a binding hand and conducted grasping experiments on 10 kinds of food products. The experimental results were compared, and the conditions for stable grasping were discussed. In addition, we expect that the deflection of the binding hand affects the grasping results. We attempted to predict the grasping results by calculating the deflection from the model of the beam and comparing it with the actual measured values.