Multi-Fingered Soft Gripper Driven by Bellows Actuator for Handling Food Materials
Multi-Fingered Soft Gripper Driven by Bellows Actuator for Handling Food Materials
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DOI：
10.1109/m2vip49856.2021.9665096
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发表时间：
2021-11
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Oki Morikage;Zhongkui Wang;S. Hirai
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Oki Morikage;Zhongkui Wang;S. Hirai
在日本，由于超老龄化社会造成的劳动力短缺，近年来食品行业对自动化的需求不断增加。然而，由于食品材料的形状、尺寸、易碎性和表面特性的巨大变化，机器人处理原料食品材料对传统的刚性抓手提出了挑战。本文提出了一种由波纹管执行机构驱动的软夹持器，用于各种食品的搬运。这个想法是利用波纹管致动器的收缩来驱动多指软结构进行抓取。所提出的抓取器的一个重要特征是在抓取过程中主动与环境接触，因此，它们有望能够抓取具有薄轮廓的食物材料。制作了三种不同的夹持器设计，分别有两个、六个和八个手指，并对五种生食产品进行了实验测试。我们发现，提出的夹具可以抓住薄的食品，如日本煎蛋卷。结果还表明，增加手指数量并不能保证更好的抓取性能，平行双指抓取器在三种不同的抓取器设计中表现最好。
In Japan, the demands for automation in the food industry are constantly increasing in recent years due to the labor shortage caused by the super-aged society. However, robotic handling of raw food materials presents challenges for conventional rigid grippers due to the large variations in shape, size, fragility, and surface properties of food materials. In this paper, soft grippers driven by bellows actuator are proposed for handling various food products. The idea is to use the contraction of the bellows actuator to drive a multi-fingered soft structure for grasping. An important feature of the proposed grippers is that they actively make contact with the environment during grasping, and therefore, they are expected to be able to grasp food materials with thin profiles. Three different gripper designs, which have two, six, and eight fingers respectively, were fabricated and experimentally tested for grasping five kinds of raw food products. We found that the proposed grippers can grasp thin food products such as a Japanese omelet. Results also suggested that increasing the number of the fingers did not guarantee better grasping performances and the parallel two-fingered gripper performed the best among the three different gripper designs.