A Novel Soft-Robotic Gripper with Vertically Plane Contact of the Object

This paper presents a novel soft-robotic gripper. The proposed soft-robotic gripper combines two dual-joint pneumatic actuators. The high passive compliance of joint II of the soft actuators realizes vertically plane contact with the object, which improves the grasping reliability. The bending angle and output force of the actuators with different bottom layers were analyzed by finite element analysis. The contact force and contact area of the actuator with the object have been analyzed by finite element analysis. The fabrication of the soft actuators are presented. Then the grasping performance of the soft gripper was studied by systematic experiments at different pressure when grasping rings with different diameters in different positions of the actuator to obtain the optimal position.