Design of 3D-Printable Compliant Robotic Grippers Using Solid Geometry Library in MATLAB

Robotic grippers are used in a wide range of industrial applications for the manipulation of objects. To simplify the assembly process of robotic grippers, compliant grippers with a monolithic structure are introduced in the gripper design. In this paper, we propose a unified surface-model-based framework in MATLAB to achieve the parametric design of 3D-printable compliant grippers. A compliant parallel-grasping mechanism is utilized in this work to achieve parallel closing motions of the gripper jaws, while the shape of the jaws is adapted to the target object to realize task-specific grasping. As a proof of concept, two grippers designed by using our framework are used to grasp objects with different shapes. Results show that the printed gripper prototypes can firmly grasp the objects, which successfully verified the feasibility of our design framework.