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A 3D Printed Modular Soft Gripper Integrated With Metamaterials for Conformal Grasping

A single universal robotic gripper with the capacity to fulfill a wide variety of gripping and grasping tasks has always been desirable. A three-dimensional (3D) printed modular soft gripper with highly conformal soft fingers that are composed of positive pressure soft pneumatic actuators along with...

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Autores principales: Tawk, Charbel, Mutlu, Rahim, Alici, Gursel
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8782332/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35071336
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2021.799230
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author Tawk, Charbel
Mutlu, Rahim
Alici, Gursel
author_facet Tawk, Charbel
Mutlu, Rahim
Alici, Gursel
author_sort Tawk, Charbel
collection PubMed
description A single universal robotic gripper with the capacity to fulfill a wide variety of gripping and grasping tasks has always been desirable. A three-dimensional (3D) printed modular soft gripper with highly conformal soft fingers that are composed of positive pressure soft pneumatic actuators along with a mechanical metamaterial was developed. The fingers of the soft gripper along with the mechanical metamaterial, which integrates a soft auxetic structure and compliant ribs, was 3D printed in a single step, without requiring support material and postprocessing, using a low-cost and open-source fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printer that employs a commercially available thermoplastic poly (urethane) (TPU). The soft fingers of the gripper were optimized using finite element modeling (FEM). The FE simulations accurately predicted the behavior and performance of the fingers in terms of deformation and tip force. Also, FEM was used to predict the contact behavior of the mechanical metamaterial to prove that it highly decreases the contact pressure by increasing the contact area between the soft fingers and the grasped objects and thus proving its effectiveness in enhancing the grasping performance of the gripper. The contact pressure can be decreased by up to 8.5 times with the implementation of the mechanical metamaterial. The configuration of the highly conformal gripper can be easily modulated by changing the number of fingers attached to its base to tailor it for specific manipulation tasks. Two-dimensional (2D) and 3D grasping experiments were conducted to assess the grasping performance of the soft modular gripper and to prove that the inclusion of the metamaterial increases its conformability and reduces the out-of-plane deformations of the soft monolithic fingers upon grasping different objects and consequently, resulting in the gripper in three different configurations including two, three and four-finger configurations successfully grasping a wide variety of objects.
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spelling pubmed-87823322022-01-22 A 3D Printed Modular Soft Gripper Integrated With Metamaterials for Conformal Grasping Tawk, Charbel Mutlu, Rahim Alici, Gursel Front Robot AI Robotics and AI A single universal robotic gripper with the capacity to fulfill a wide variety of gripping and grasping tasks has always been desirable. A three-dimensional (3D) printed modular soft gripper with highly conformal soft fingers that are composed of positive pressure soft pneumatic actuators along with a mechanical metamaterial was developed. The fingers of the soft gripper along with the mechanical metamaterial, which integrates a soft auxetic structure and compliant ribs, was 3D printed in a single step, without requiring support material and postprocessing, using a low-cost and open-source fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printer that employs a commercially available thermoplastic poly (urethane) (TPU). The soft fingers of the gripper were optimized using finite element modeling (FEM). The FE simulations accurately predicted the behavior and performance of the fingers in terms of deformation and tip force. Also, FEM was used to predict the contact behavior of the mechanical metamaterial to prove that it highly decreases the contact pressure by increasing the contact area between the soft fingers and the grasped objects and thus proving its effectiveness in enhancing the grasping performance of the gripper. The contact pressure can be decreased by up to 8.5 times with the implementation of the mechanical metamaterial. The configuration of the highly conformal gripper can be easily modulated by changing the number of fingers attached to its base to tailor it for specific manipulation tasks. Two-dimensional (2D) and 3D grasping experiments were conducted to assess the grasping performance of the soft modular gripper and to prove that the inclusion of the metamaterial increases its conformability and reduces the out-of-plane deformations of the soft monolithic fingers upon grasping different objects and consequently, resulting in the gripper in three different configurations including two, three and four-finger configurations successfully grasping a wide variety of objects. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-01-07 /pmc/articles/PMC8782332/ /pubmed/35071336 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2021.799230 Text en Copyright © 2022 Tawk, Mutlu and Alici. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Robotics and AI
Tawk, Charbel
Mutlu, Rahim
Alici, Gursel
A 3D Printed Modular Soft Gripper Integrated With Metamaterials for Conformal Grasping
title A 3D Printed Modular Soft Gripper Integrated With Metamaterials for Conformal Grasping
title_full A 3D Printed Modular Soft Gripper Integrated With Metamaterials for Conformal Grasping
title_fullStr A 3D Printed Modular Soft Gripper Integrated With Metamaterials for Conformal Grasping
title_full_unstemmed A 3D Printed Modular Soft Gripper Integrated With Metamaterials for Conformal Grasping
title_short A 3D Printed Modular Soft Gripper Integrated With Metamaterials for Conformal Grasping
title_sort 3d printed modular soft gripper integrated with metamaterials for conformal grasping
topic Robotics and AI
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8782332/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35071336
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2021.799230
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