Design and Analysis of a Novel Underactuated Adaptive Gripper for Robotic Assembly

Personalization and customization are the main characteristics of the future society, and they will greatly change the existing production methods and lifestyles. In order to meet the individual requirements, customized production mode will become the normal production mode of small and medium-sized enterprises in the future. This requires automation systems with greater flexibility and adaptability to handle objects with different shapes, sizes and materials. In the complex and changeable tasks of future robots, the adaptive grasping technology will therefore become the key to the success of future robotic applications. Although great progress has been made in the research of dexterous grippers, they still cannot meet industrial requirements in terms of compactness, reliability and cost-effectiveness, etc. For this purpose, this paper proposes a novel low-cost underactuated adaptive gripper, where an one-input-four-output grasping mechanism is designed to achieve stable fingertip grasp. The grasping forces can be balanced automatically when grasping an irregular-shaped object due to the clever mechanism design. Kinematic modeling is performed to analyze the workspace of the designed gripper. After the gripper prototype is fabricated, the grasping and assembly experiments of regular flat objects (i.e., electric iron soleplates) is performed, which verifies its excellent characteristics.