The Journal of Korea Robotics Society (로봇학회논문지)

Korea Robotics Society (한국로봇학회)
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Improved Design for Enhanced Grip Stability of the Flexible Gripper in Harvesting Robot

파지 안정성을 강화한 과수 수확용 로봇 그리퍼의 설계 개선

  • Received : 2020.02.22
  • Accepted : 2020.04.29
  • Published : 2020.05.31
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Abstract

In robotic harvesting, a gripper to manipulate the fruits needs to be attached to the robot system. We proposed a flexible robot gripper that can actively respond to the shape of an object such as fruits in the previous work. However, we found that there is a possibility of not being reliably gripped when the object slides during contact with a finger. In this paper, the improved gripper design is proposed to fundamentally solve the problems of the previous gripper. The position of the finger and the maximum closed position are changed, and the design improvement is performed to increase the grip stability by changing the installation angle of the link portion of the finger. Based on the improved design, a modified gripper is fabricated by 3-D printing, and then gripping experiments are performed on spherical object and fruit model object. It is shown that the gripper can stably grip the objects without excessive bending of the finger link of the gripper. The contact pressure between the finger and the surface of the object is measured, and it is verified that it is a sufficiently small pressure that does not cause damage to the fruit. Therefore, the proposed gripper is expected to be successfully applied in harvesting.

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References

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