A Bioinspired Soft Swallowing Gripper for Universal Adaptable Grasping.

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  • Additional Information
    • Source:
      Publisher: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 101623819 Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 2169-5180 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 21695172 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Soft Robot Subsets: MEDLINE
    • Publication Information:
      Original Publication: New Rochelle, NY : Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., [2014]-
    • Subject Terms:
      Deglutition* ; Robotics*/methods; Equipment Design ; Hand Strength ; Reproducibility of Results
    • Abstract:
      This article presents the design, fabrication, modeling, and preliminary tests of a bloodworm-inspired soft gripper for universal grasping. The gripper was designed and fabricated based on a toy called water snake wiggly (WSW). The toroidal WSW can evert itself inside-out or outside-in, just like a bloodworm everting its teeth outside to hunt and inside to feed. By driving a WSW rolling itself outside-in to wrap around the items, a bloodworm-inspired gripper was achieved with a flexible and passive form-fitting grasp. To enhance the capability of the gripper, two alternative detachable modules were added to the gripper-a vacuum suction cup for handling objects with smooth nonporous surfaces and an end-needle for taking in and expelling noncorrosive liquids like a syringe. We analyzed the working principles of the gripper and derived the relationship between the gripper's holding force and the objects' scale. Preliminary experiments with a motor-driven gripper prototype were conducted to verify its performance. The experimental results conform well with our theoretical analysis and also indicate the gripper's good universal grasping capacity and reliability in handling a wide range of objects with different surface shapes, geometric dimensions, and stiffness. In addition, the gripper has the unique abilities to pick more than one object during a maneuver, grasp multiple objects in a row without releasing the former ones, and even grasp powdered objects. These have presented a challenge for the existing robotic grippers.
    • Contributed Indexing:
      Keywords: bioinspired robotics; self-adaptive gripper; soft robots; universal grasping
    • Publication Date:
      Date Created: 20201204 Date Completed: 20220421 Latest Revision: 20220421
    • Publication Date:
      20240104
    • Accession Number:
      10.1089/soro.2019.0106
    • Accession Number:
      33275516