High-Speed Grasping and Transfer of Fragile Food by Soft Hand Fabricated Using Liquid Silicone 3D Printer

Abstract

Fragile objects are usually difficult to handle, especially at a high-speed motion because the inertial force itself could damage the objects. Pneumatic soft end-effectors have been developed in recent years for handling deformable objects, but handling very fragile objects still remains challenging. In this paper, we proposed a pneumatic soft robotic hand consisting of two soft fingers with a shovel shape and a soft support in between two fingers to handle fragile objects. The robotic hand was fabricated using a liquid silicone 3D printer and tested on raw oyster attached with bread crumbs. Results suggested that the proposed robotic hand can handle fragile object at a high-speed (takt: 80/min).