Related papers: A Palm-Shape Variable-Stiffness Gripper based on 3…
Fine assembly tasks such as electrical connector insertion have tight tolerances and sensitive components, limiting the speed and robustness of robot assembly, even when using vision, tactile, or force sensors. Connector insertion is a…
Properly handling delicate produce with robotic manipulators is a major part of the future role of automation in agricultural harvesting and processing. Grasping with the correct amount of force is crucial in not only ensuring proper grip…
Existing grasp synthesis methods are either analytical or data-driven. The former one is oftentimes limited to specific application scope. The latter one depends heavily on demonstrations, thus suffers from generalization issues; e.g.,…
Robotic grasping of 3D deformable objects (e.g., fruits/vegetables, internal organs, bottles/boxes) is critical for real-world applications such as food processing, robotic surgery, and household automation. However, developing grasp…
Selective fruit harvesting is a challenging manipulation problem due to occlusions and clutter arising from plant foliage. A harvesting gripper should i) have a small cross-section, to avoid collisions while approaching the fruit; ii) have…
Vacuum Suction Grabbing Technology. The primary objective of this study was to design the grabbing technique used to determine the vacuum suction gripper and its design parameters for the pocket welting operation in apparel manufacturing.…
Teleoperation is often limited by the ability of an operator to react and predict the behavior of the robot as it interacts with the environment. For example, to grasp small objects on a table, the teleoperator needs to predict the position…
Robotic arms built from stiffness-adjustable, continuously bending segments serially connected with revolute joints have the ability to change their mechanical architecture and workspace, thus allowing high flexibility and adaptation to…
A robust grip is key to successful manipulation and joining of work pieces involved in any industrial assembly process. Stability of a grip depends on geometric and physical properties of the object as well as the gripper itself. Current…
This paper presents a systematic topology optimization framework for designing a soft pneumatic gripper (SPG), explicitly considering the design-dependent nature of the actuating load. The load is modeled using Darcy's law with an added…
This paper presents the technique of flex-and-flip manipulation. It is suitable for grasping thin, flexible linear objects lying on a flat surface. During the manipulation process, the object is first flexed by a robotic gripper whose…
Robotic hands with soft surfaces can perform stable grasping, but the high friction of the soft surfaces makes it difficult to release objects, or to perform operations that require sliding. To solve this issue, we previously developed a…
Separating thin, flexible layers that must be individually grasped is a common but challenging manipulation primitive for most off-the-shelf grippers. A prominent example arises in clinical settings: the opening of sterile flat pouches for…
Human hands are able to grasp a wide range of object sizes, shapes, and weights, achieved via reshaping and altering their apparent grasping stiffness between compliant power and rigid precision. Achieving similar versatility in robotic…
Multi-suction-cup grippers are frequently employed to perform pick-and-place robotic tasks, especially in industrial settings where grasping a wide range of light to heavy objects in limited amounts of time is a common requirement. However,…
For robot arms to perform everyday tasks in unstructured environments, these robots must be able to manipulate a diverse range of objects. Today's robots often grasp objects with either soft grippers or rigid end-effectors. However, purely…
This study proposes a novel robotic gripper with variable grasping configurations for grasping various objects. The fingers of the developed gripper incorporate multiple different surfaces. The gripper possesses the function of altering the…
The food packaging industry goes through changes in food items and their weights quite rapidly. These items range from easy-to-pick, single-piece food items to flexible, long and cluttered ones. We propose a replaceable bit-based gripper…
Humans grasp unfamiliar objects by combining an initial visual estimate with tactile and proprioceptive feedback during interaction. We present ShapeGrasp, a robotic implementation of this approach. The proposed method is an iterative…
In this paper, we propose a single-actuator gripper that can lift thin objects lying on a flat surface, in addition to the ability as a standard parallel gripper. The key is a crawler on the fingertip, which is underactuated together with…