A Soft, Fast and Versatile Electrohydraulic Gripper with Capacitive Object Size Detection

2023

Article

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Soft robotic grippers achieve increased versatility and reduced complexity through intelligence embodied in their flexible and conformal structures. The most widely used soft grippers are pneumatically driven; they are simple and effective but require bulky air compressors that limit their application space and external sensors or computationally expensive vision systems for pick verification. In this study, a multi-material architecture for self-sensing electrohydraulic bending actuators is presented that enables a new class of highly versatile and reconfigurable soft grippers that are electrically driven and feature capacitive pick verification and object size detection. These elec-trohydraulic grippers are fast (step input results in finger closure in 50 ms), draw low power (6.5 mW per finger to hold grasp), and can pick a wide variety of objects with simple binary electrical control. Integrated high-voltage driving electronics are presented that greatly increase the application space of the grippers and make them readily compatible with commercially available robotic arms.

@article{Yoder22-AFM-Gripper,
  title = {A Soft, Fast and Versatile Electrohydraulic Gripper with Capacitive Object Size Detection},
  author = {Yoder, Zachary and Macari, Daniela and Kleinwaks, Gavriel and Schmidt, Ingemar and Acome, Eric and Keplinger, Christoph},
  journal = {Advanced Functional Materials},
  volume = {23},
  number = {3},
  pages = {2209080},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.1002/adfm.202209080}
}