Design and Validation of a Manoeuvering Caging Gripper for Cluttered Environments

A mechanical approach for grasping in cluttered environments

Master thesis (2022)

Authors

B. Friederich Mechanical Engineering

Contributors

A.E. Huisjes Mechatronic Systems Design - Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering (mentor)

J.L. Herder Precision and Microsystems Engineering (graduation committee member)

V. van der Wijk Mechatronic Systems Design - Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering (graduation committee member)

Faculty

Mechanical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

Adaptive Compliant Grasping Clutter Gripper Manoeuvering Eversion Frictionless Agri-food

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Published Date

21-04-2022

Language

English

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Faculty

Mechanical Engineering

Abstract

This research proposes and validates a novel grasping principle to be able to set caging grasps in cluttered environments. A prototype is designed making use of manoeuvering fingers which propagate along the object surface and are covered with everting belts to minimize slip and thus friction forces on the object and environment. Using several lab setups, it is shown that the designed gripper fingers closely follow spherical objects, and do so while exerting only negligible normal and friction forces on the object or surrounding clutter. Furthermore, the gripper is validated with a robotic system in a practical test case of grasping tomatoes from a dense cluttered pile. The gripper successfully grasped 100% of the objects without any control effort in terms of clutter avoidance and grasp pose control. This shows that this novel strategy for setting a caging grasp makes grasping difficult objects in cluttered environments robust and highly successful.

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- Embargo expired in 21-04-2024