由于平衡力的问题,在非结构化环境中抓取不同物体的需求不断增加,对现有的软/刚性机器人手指提出了严峻的挑战,合规,和稳定性,因此催生了几种混合设计。这些混合设计利用刚性和柔性结构的优点,并显示出更好的性能,但是他们仍然遭受狭窄的输出力范围,有限的合规性,很少报道稳定性。由于其具有柔性切换多个姿势的刚软耦合结构,人的手指,作为一个优秀的混合设计,显示宽范围的输出力,优秀的合规性,和稳定性。受人类手指的启发,我们提出了一种具有多种模式和姿势的混合手指,由并联的软执行器(SA)和刚性执行器(RA)耦合。由基于气动的刚软协作策略形成的多种致动模式可以选择性地实现RA的高力和SA的柔度,而从特殊设计的欠驱动RA骨架中获得的多个姿势可以灵活地随着任务切换,从而实现高度合规。这种混合手指也被证明在外部刺激或重力下高度稳定。此外,我们将这些手指模块化并配置成一系列具有出色抓握性能的夹持器,例如,广泛的可抓握物体范围(从0.1克薯片到420克两指夹持器的27公斤哑铃),高顺应性(耐受94%夹持器跨度尺寸和4厘米偏移的物体),和高稳定性。我们的研究强调了融合刚软技术用于机器人开发的潜力,并可能影响未来的仿生学和高性能机器人的发展。
The increasing demand for
grasping diverse objects in unstructured environments poses severe challenges to the existing soft/rigid robotic fingers due to the issues in balancing force, compliance, and stability, and hence has given birth to several hybrid designs. These hybrid designs utilize the advantages of rigid and soft structures and show better performance, but they are still suffering from narrow output force range, limited compliance, and rarely reported stability. Owing to its rigid-soft coupling structure with flexible switched multiple poses, human finger, as an excellent hybrid design, shows wide-range output force, excellent compliance, and stability. Inspired by human finger, we propose a hybrid finger with multiple modes and poses, coupled by a soft actuator (SA) and a rigid actuator (RA) in parallel. The multiple actuation modes formed by a pneumatic-based rigid-soft collaborative strategy can selectively enable the RA\'s high force and SA\'s softness, whereas the multiple poses derived from the specially designed underactuated RA skeleton can be flexibly switched with tasks, thus achieving high compliance. Such hybrid fingers also proved to be highly stable under external stimuli or gravity. Furthermore, we modularize and configure these fingers into a series of grippers with excellent
grasping performance, for example, wide graspable object range (diverse from 0.1 g potato chips to 27 kg dumbbells for a 420 g two-finger gripper), high compliance (tolerate objects with 94% gripper span size and 4 cm offset), and high stability. Our study highlights the potential of fusing rigid-soft technologies for robot development, and potentially impacts future bionics and high-performance robot development.