SBIR Phase I: Gentle: A Smart, Affordable, Soft Gripper for Robotic Food Picking and Packaging

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是提高新鲜水果、蔬菜、烘焙食品的采摘和包装、农业以及需要物理处理或抓取各种精致物品的任务的吞吐量。电动软机器人抓手技术本质上是安全的，可以在人类居住的环境中工作，也可以与人类工人合作，因为它的软手指在碰撞时可以变形并吸收冲击。此外，随着研究和开发产生的数据，从长远来看，机器人手将开辟新的用例，例如帮助农民从树上采摘水果。这项研究在机器人技术领域开展，目标是传统机器人抓取器和算法难以抓取的物品，它将有助于传统手工流程的自动化和效率的提高，这些流程因缺乏足够的工人而无法最终支持美国制造业。由于软机器人在人类交互中的固有安全性和适应性，该研究还具有扩展到协作机器人、医疗保健和辅助机器人等其他领域的长期效益。这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的重点是采用模块化方法、感觉集成和反馈控制的电动软抓取器的技术研究和开发，以及新算法和用户界面的研究，以赋予这些系统智能以提高性能。当物体的大小、重量、形状和易碎性发生变化时，机器人系统集成商发现很难使用传统的刚性和昂贵的抓取器来自动化平凡的、低价值的任务。软爪可以提供一种解决方案，以适应物体和其他条件的变化。软手指的电气操作可以直接与机械臂集成，消除了复杂的基础设施要求，降低了成本，这将有助于提高投资回报率，降低小企业利用这项最新技术的进入壁垒。该研究将在新鲜农产品采摘和包装以及电子商务订单履行应用中遇到的常见现实条件下进行测试和验证。研究目标是：优化设计和制造技术，量化抓取行为以提高适应性，提供反馈控制，并通过结合数据和用户输入来确定最佳抓取参数，从而集成抓取器的智能。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is the improvement in throughput of fresh fruit, vegetable, baked item picking and packing, agriculture, and tasks that require physically handling or grasping a wide range of delicate objects. The electrically-actuated soft robotic gripper technology is inherently safe to work in human-occupied environments and collaborate with human workers since its soft fingers can deform and absorb impacts in case of a collision. In addition, with the data generated from the research and development, new use cases will be opened for robotic hands in the long term such as helping farmers pick fruits from trees. Working in the robotics technology area and targeting items that are difficult to pick up by traditional robotic grippers and algorithms, the research will help automate and increase the efficiency of traditionally manual processes that suffer from a lack of enough workers to ultimately support American manufacturing. This research also has longer-term benefits to expand into other sectors such as collaborative robotics, healthcare, and assistive robotics areas because of the inherent safety and adaptability of soft robotics in human interaction. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project focuses on technical research and development of electrically actuated soft grippers with a modular approach, sensory integration, and feedback control, as well as the study of new algorithms and user interfaces to endow these systems with intelligence for improved performance. When there is variation in object size, weight, shape, and fragility, robotic system integrators find it difficult to use traditional rigid and expensive grippers to automate mundane, low-value tasks. Soft grippers can provide a solution, adapting to variations in objects and other conditions. Enabling electrical operation of soft fingers enables direct integration with robotic arms eliminating complex infrastructure requirements and reducing cost, which will help improve the return on investment and reduce barriers of entry for small businesses to utilize this latest technology. The research will undertake testing and validation under common, realistic conditions encountered in fresh produce picking and packing and e-commerce order fulfillment applications. The research goals are to: optimize the design and fabrication techniques and quantify grasping behavior for improved adaptability, provide feedback control, and integrate intelligence to the grippers by incorporating data and user input to determine optimal grasp parameters.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.