Pneumatic shape-shifting fingers to reorient and grasp
Name
1809.08420.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
3.65 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
c71b85af67b16d3514f06f45c6b66ce9
Author(s)
Chavan-Dafie, Nikhil
Lee, Kyubin
Rodriguez, Alberto
Date Issued
December 2018
Journal
IEEE 14th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE)
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Citation
Chavan-Dafie, Nikhil et al. "Pneumatic shape-shifting fingers to reorient and grasp." IEEE 14th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, August 2018, Munich, Germany, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, December 2018. © 2018 IEEE
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We present pneumatic shape-shifting fingers to enable a simple parallel-jaw gripper for different manipulation modalities. By changing the finger geometry, the gripper effectively changes the contact type between the fingers and an object to facilitate distinct manipulation primitives. In this paper, we demonstrate the development and application of shape-shifting fingers to reorient and grasp cylindrical objects. The shape of the fingers changes based on the air pressure inside them and attains two distinct geometric forms at high and low pressure values. In our implementation, the finger shape switches between a wedge-shaped geometry and V-shaped geometry at high and low pressure, respectively. Using the wedge-shaped geometry, the fingers provide a point contact on a cylindrical object to pivot it to a vertical pose under the effect of gravity. By changing to V-shaped geometry, the fingers localize the object in the vertical pose and securely hold it. Experimental results show that the smooth transition between the two contact types allows a robot with a simple gripper to reorient a cylindrical object lying horizontally on a ground and to grasp it in a vertical pose.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1109/coase.2018.8560472
