Grant: Idea to Innovation

Robotic industries have seen a tremendous growth in recent years especially with the introduction and noticeable penetration on the market of collaborative robots, namely robots who can work in close proximity with humans. However, if robotic arms exist that are both versatile and precise, their end-of-arm tooling is mostly simplistic, especially for grasping. On one hand, simple industrial robotic grippers while affordable cannot provide modern robotic systems with the required flexibility to grasp objects with various shapes and textures in an often unstructured environment. On the other hand, complex robotic hands exist that can handle these objects but with a large number of actuators and sensors, they are prohibitively expensive. Recently, underactuated, a.k.a. adaptive, robotic hands and grippers have been commercially released to try to solve this issue. While providing the robot using them with a flexible tool to grasp various objects they are still hindered by several issues slowing their adoption in the industry, such as the requirement to reprogram the controllers, machining of specific adapter plates, etc. Furthermore, their cost, while smaller than their fully actuated counterparts, is still an order of magnitude greater than conventional grippers. To solve these issues, the applicant has proposed in the literature to use a novel architecture of adaptive mechanical fingers that can be attached to conventional grippers and use the latter as an actuation module of the resulting hand. Since these fingers are purely mechanical and they are using existing grippers for actuation, the cost and complexity of upgrading the tooling is very limited. In this proposal, the applicant is proposing to design and build a metal version of previously 3D printed prototypes (in plastic) and use a rigorous set of experiments to measure and compare their performances against other existing products. These results will prepare for an upcoming commercialization of the fingers.