TY - JOUR
T1 - Topology Optimized Design, Fabrication, and Characterization of a Soft Cable-Driven Gripper
AU - Chen, Feifei
AU - Xu, Wenjun
AU - Zhang, Hongying
AU - Wang, Yiqiang
AU - Cao, Jiawei
AU - Wang, Michael Yu
AU - Ren, Hongliang
AU - Zhu, Jian
AU - Zhang, Y. F.
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received September 10, 2017; accepted January 3, 2018. Date of publication January 31, 2018; date of current version March 29, 2018. This letter was recommended for publication by Associate Editor M. Rakotondrabe and Editor Y. Sun upon evaluation of the reviewers’ comments. This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research Global under Grant ONRG-NICOP-N62909-15-1-2029. (Corresponding author: Hongying Zhang.) F. Chen, H. Zhang, J. Cao, J. Zhu, and Y. F. Zhang are with Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117575 (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; jiaweic @u.nus.edu; [email protected]; [email protected]).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.
PY - 2018/7
Y1 - 2018/7
N2 - Soft-bodied robots, due to their intrinsic compliance, have shown great potential for operating within unstructured environment and interacting with unknown objects. This letter deals with automatic design and fabrication of soft robots. From a structure point of view, we synthesize a soft cable-driven gripper by recasting its mechanical design as a topology optimization problem. Building on previous work on compliant mechanism optimization, we model the interactions between the gripper and objects more practically, in form of pressure loadings and friction tractions, and furthermore, we investigate how the interaction uncertainties affect the optimization solution by varying the contact location and area. The optimized soft fingers were three-dimensionally printed and then assembled to build a gripper. The experiments show that the gripper can handle a large range of unknown objects of different shapes and weights (up to 1 kg), with different grasping modes. This letter represents an important step toward leveraging the full potential of the freeform design space to generate novel soft-bodied robots.
AB - Soft-bodied robots, due to their intrinsic compliance, have shown great potential for operating within unstructured environment and interacting with unknown objects. This letter deals with automatic design and fabrication of soft robots. From a structure point of view, we synthesize a soft cable-driven gripper by recasting its mechanical design as a topology optimization problem. Building on previous work on compliant mechanism optimization, we model the interactions between the gripper and objects more practically, in form of pressure loadings and friction tractions, and furthermore, we investigate how the interaction uncertainties affect the optimization solution by varying the contact location and area. The optimized soft fingers were three-dimensionally printed and then assembled to build a gripper. The experiments show that the gripper can handle a large range of unknown objects of different shapes and weights (up to 1 kg), with different grasping modes. This letter represents an important step toward leveraging the full potential of the freeform design space to generate novel soft-bodied robots.
KW - grasping
KW - Soft robotics
KW - topology optimization
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85063305773&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/LRA.2018.2800115
DO - 10.1109/LRA.2018.2800115
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85063305773
SN - 2377-3766
VL - 3
SP - 2463
EP - 2470
JO - IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
JF - IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
IS - 3
ER -