DESIGN, ANALYSIS AND FABRICATION OF SOFT PNEUMATIC GRIPPER FOR INDUSTRIAL APPLICATION

Soft Robotic Gripper is a novel and highly researched field of soft robotics usually inspired from nature. Compared to rigid grippers, end-effectors fabricated from flexible and soft components can often grasp or manipulate a larger variety of objects with complex geometries. Such grippers are an example of morphological computation, where control complexity is greatly reduced by material softness and mechanical compliance. Grippers in the present work is chosen as anatomical fingers of human. These Grippers are fabricated using silicone elastomers. The gripper comes under soft Pneumatic grippers are designed in a way that it consists of hollow chambers inside its body and these can be manipulated by changing the pressure in those chambers. Fabrication of soft gripper carried out using 3D Printing, mould, casting. The present work also focused on different type of soft Grippers, materials, fabrication methods and different type of actuation. The fabrication of Controller is also reported. The present work also reported Finite Element Analysis to know the actuation Range of the grippers. Controller is based on the Electro-pneumatic circuit for soft robots. This controller consists of solenoids, air pump, Arduino as main components to manipulate the pressure inside the Grippers