Design and Control of Soft-Rigid Grippers for Food Handling

Valerio Bo, Leonardo Franco, Enrico Turco, Maria Pozzi, Monica Malvezzi, Domenico Prattichizzo, gionata salvietti

Keywords: Grippers and Other End-Effectors, Grasping, Soft Robot Applications

TL;DR: Development of a soft-rigid gripper for food handling

Abstract:

Food handling is a challenging task for robotic grippers, as it requires to manipulate highly deformable and fragile items, that can be easily damaged.
Moreover, ingredients for the preparation of the different dishes are usually stored in small containers that are often not easily accessible.
This abstract introduces design and control techniques to design soft-rigid grippers. Specifically, we propose an innovative soft-rigid, tendon-driven gripper: the Double-Scoop Gripper (DSG). Its two-fingered design exploits a specialized structure to cope with constrained spaces. The DSG can delicately grasp objects of various shapes by employing two scoop-shaped fingertips that can form a single plate when fingers are flexed.
DSG capabilities are verified with experiments conducted using real food ingredients within a pick-and-place setup to evaluate both the grasping and the releasing capability of the gripper. Obtained results are promising and suggest that this approach could be particularly advantageous in the context of automated food serving.

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Submission Number: 10