Design and Characterization of Soft Pneumatic Actuator for Universal Robot Gripper

In industrial application, the conventional hard grippers have been widely used for a long time. However, when hard grippers are used, the shape of the gripper surface has to be designed according to the shape of the grasping objects, so the gripper can only hold a few numbers of objects and in some cases unique object. Recently, soft actuators are drawing attention in robotics field due to their high flexibility, lightness, ease of fabrication and its low cost. In this paper, we present a universal soft pneumatic gripper which consists of four soft bending actuators and a soft wrist. Direct 3D printing technique is presented in the fabrication process of the soft pneumatic actuators as a new technique by using two different types of TPU 3D printer filament. Soft actuators characterization such as the radius of curvature and the bending performance are presented by using the advantage of ABAQUS/CAE software and experimental tests.