In recent years, robotics experts around the world have designed a variety of robot grippers that can pick up and manipulate different types of objects.
When dealing with real-world manual tasks, especially complex object manipulation tasks, the most effective grippers are usually hand-inspired.
Although they usually perform well, many humanoid robots rely on advanced (and sometimes expensive) mechanisms, as well as complex programming tools.
This may limit their large-scale deployment because it is not conducive to the development of energy-efficient and cost-effective robots.
(photo source: arxiv.
org) according to foreign media reports, researchers at Purdue University and MIT recently developed a simpler but seemingly equally effective robot gripper.
According to a paper published on the arXiv preprint server, the gripper has been found to be effective in handling complex object manipulation tasks, although its degree of freedom (DOF) is smaller than that of a hand-inspired gripper.
Yu She, co-author of the paper, said: “traditional high-DOF dexterous manipulators can perform complex hand-held manipulations, but because of their complex mechanisms, it is not easy for programming / control.
In contrast, the traditional single DOF parallel clamp robot gripper is easy to program / control, but it is limited to grasping tasks, and it is challenging to perform handheld manipulation.
Our team aims to design a gripper that can bridge the gap between the two grippers.
” The new gripper developed by this research has five DOF Although its design is simple and easier to control through programming tools, depending on the perceptual data recorded by the integrated vision-based tactile sensor, the gripper can still perform hand-held operations similar to those of humans.
The newly designed gripper is basically composed of two fingers connected to the holder base.
It is worth mentioning that the team also installed a small visual base tactile sensor on the top of the left finger of the gripper.
“the holder base provides a DOF for closing and opening the clamp,” Yu She said.
Each finger is equipped with a linear actuator and a rotary servo motor, providing a total of five DOF for the gripper.
The fingers of the clamp are made of PLA material by 3D printing.
A GelSight miniature vision-based tactile sensor is installed at the left fingertip to provide information about the geometry, direction and clamping force of the grasped object.
” The characteristic of the gripper is that although its movement is easy to control, it can still achieve a high level of flexibility in handheld manipulation tasks by combining five degrees of freedom.
The researchers evaluated the gripper through a series of initial real-world experiments and found that it exceeded the basic operating skills of most simple grippers with several degrees of freedom.
The gripper can effectively perform two types of object manipulation tasks, namely, singulation and scooping.
For example, it can imitate the human action of wiping off the sand stuck between the surface and fingers of the object, which is what human beings may do when picking up shells on the beach.
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