Design and Fabrication of a Three Finger Soft Gripper

The design and development of soft pneumatic actuated gripper are proposed in this paper. In this paper, we demonstrate that soft robotic hands offer a reliable method for carrying out delicate and irregular shaped objects. The pneumatic finger mold was initially designed using CAD software tool such as Solidworks, and the mold was then 3D printed. The finger then formed using Silicozest (liquid silicone), a soft, biodegradable substance. The pneumatic actuation was given by supplying pressurised air through the compressor, while bending was confined unidirectionally by adding a strain limiting layer. To build a gripper, the fingers were arranged on a spherical framework. The grasping capability of the prototype was examined through its gripping action while holding different objects of weighing 50 to 250 g. The gripper has many applications, from the food industry to the pharmaceutical industry, and there is scope to modify this gripper into a humanoid hand for better interaction between humans and robots. Overall, we present design and fabrication of soft gripper that can perform effectively without the use of complicated control or local sensing, even for challenging tasks like in-hand manipulation by adjusting the air pressure.