Design and Simulation of 3 Fingered Underactuated Gripper

The paper proposes to design and develop an under-actuated three fingered gripper with 7 degrees of freedom. The objective is to simulate a flexible gripper, able to grasp objects of a variety of shapes, using ROS framework. A gripper is designed which is driven by four motors - one each for the three fingers, and a fourth motor to emulate the opposing action of two fingers. The prototype is designed to be used as an end effector of ABB IRB 120 manipulator. The paper discusses the different stages of design and simulation involved - specification definition, CAD modeling, torque computation for motor selection and simulation of the model in Gazebo.