Tailoring the in-plane and out-of-plane stiffness of soft fingers by endoskeleton topology optimization for stable grasping  

作　　者：LI DeChen CHEN ShiTong SONG ZeNan LIANG JiaLong ZHU XiangYang CHEN FeiFei 

机构地区：[1]State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration,School of Mechanical Engineering,Shanghai Jiao Tong University,Shanghai 200240,China [2]Meta Robotics Institute,Shanghai Jiao Tong University,Shanghai 200240,China

出　　处：《Science China(Technological Sciences)》2023年第11期3080-3089,共10页中国科学（技术科学英文版）

基　　金：supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos.52275026 and 91948302);the State Key Laboratory of Structural Analysis for Industrial Equipment (Grant No.GZ21117)。

摘　　要：The intrinsic compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with great advantages to achieve large deformation and adaptive interactions in grasping tasks.However,current soft grippers usually focus on the in-plane large deformation and load capacity but ignore the effect of out-of-plane external loads,which may lead to instability in practical scenarios.This problem calls for stiffness design along multiple directions to withstand not only in-plane interacting forces with objects,but also unexpected outof-plane loads.In this paper,we design a new type of soft finger by embedding an endoskeleton inside the widely-used PneuNets actuator,and the endoskeleton layout is optimized to achieve a remarkable bending deflection and limited lateral deflection under combined external in-plane and out-of-plane loads.Based on the multi-objective topology optimization approach,the key structural features of the optimized endoskeleton are extracted and parameterized.The multi-material soft fingers are fabricated by the silicone compound mold method.Static and dynamic experiment results validate that the soft gripper with endoskeleton embedded exhibits remarkably improved out-of-plane stiffness,without sacrificing the in-plane bending flexibility,and leads to more stable grasping.

关 键 词：soft robot soft gripper stable grasping topology optimization pneumatic actuator 

分 类 号：TB34[一般工业技术—材料科学与工程] TP242[自动化与计算机技术—检测技术与自动化装置]