PFI-TT: A Robotic Gripper with a Tunable Stiffness for Grasping Versatile Objects

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Technology Translation (PFI-TT) project offers a robotic prototype to perform tasks such as sorting, picking, and placing objects that are pervasive in e-commence, warehouse, agriculture automation, and manufacturing. If this robotic gripper is commercialized, it will help small and medium businesses rapidly adjust existing or establish new automation lines in response to market needs, reducing costs and enhancing their competitiveness in the global market. Moreover, the developed technology in the project may be also beneficial to other applications such as high performance prosthetic hands with a variable stiffness for enhanced load-carrying capacity. In the proposed broadening participation plan, Professor Su will work closely with coordinators of the Metro Early College High School (MECHS) in central Columbus to identify and recruit talented (especially minority and underrepresented) MECHS students to complete both a Summer Internship and Capstone Research Internship in the research lab. The proposed project aims to develop a scale-up prototype of a variable stiffness-compliant robotic gripper for versatile tasks in unstructured environments. Current gripper technologies offer either a high payload or a high adaptability, and this may limit their applications. The proposed variable stiffness gripper can be switched between a soft mode to a rigid mode on demand based on a recently developed layer jamming technology. The proposed applied research plan fills several knowledge gaps and overcomes key technical obstacles for commercialization. The applied research tasks are: (1) development of a scaling law to tailor design parameters for a specific performance metric; (2) design optimization of the compliant backbone to further improve the stiffness ratio and enhance robustness of the vacuum bag; (3) development of a scale-up prototype of the robotic gripper and demonstration with an industrial robotic manipulator. The technology combines the merits of rigid-body and soft grippers and may have both a high shape adaptability and a high payload capacity. This gripper technology offers key technical differentiators: significantly increased payload capacity and reduced power consumption in grasping.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.