Experimental Study of a Soft Pneumatic Actuator for the Application of Robotic Gripper

Soft bending actuators are being used in many applications such as in soft robotics and medical devices due to their compliant behavior and safe interaction. These soft actuators are mainly actuated by pneumatic pressure because of cleaner and safer operations while dealing with delicate objects and human. A soft pneumatic actuator (SPA) with multi-chambered structure is more efficient than a single chamber SPA. In this paper, a multi-chambered SPA is designed and studied experimentally. The designed SPA is fabricated using two different soft hyperelastic materials namely, Ecoflex-0030 and Ecoflex-0050. The fabrication process utilized the 3D printing and casting techniques. From the experimental studies, it is found that the SPA fabricated using Ecoflex-0050 shows more uniform bending. Therefore, this SPA is further utilized for developing a soft pneumatic gripper for the robotic application. Three fingers of Ecoflex-0050 SPA are used for the soft robotic gripper, which is tested experimentally for handling delicate objects. From the experiments, it has been observed that the developed SPA is able to grasp and hold objects of different shapes and sizes with a load carrying capacity of approximately 650 gm.