Design, Fabrication, and Analysis of a Sensorized Soft Robotic Gripper

In this paper, we present a novel design and fabrication procedure of soft robotic actuator that has the attributes of pressure and curvature sensing. The pressure sensitive layer consists of five touch sensitive regions is embedded in the soft actuator and a flexible fabric-based curvature sensor is designed and attached to the back of soft actuator. The fabrication and design are uncomplicated, cost-efficient, and do not affect the continuous bending of the soft actuator. Characterization of both sensors is performed and the results are analyzed. The actuator is capable of providing haptic and curvature feedback based on the piezoresistive effect. In the end, we utilize this feedback for a closed loop grasping experiment by placing the two actuators as a parallel gripper as well as only pressure feedback is also used to present the concept of soft haptic perception.