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research article

Adaptive Self-Sealing Suction-Based Soft Robotic Gripper

Song, Sukho  
•
Drotlef, Dirk-Michael
•
Son, Donghoon
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July 3, 2021
Advanced Science

While suction cups prevail as common gripping tools for a wide range of real-world parts and surfaces, they often fail to seal the contact interface when engaging with irregular shapes and textured surfaces. In this work, the authors propose a suction-based soft robotic gripper where suction is created inside a self-sealing, highly conformable and thin flat elastic membrane contacting a given part surface. Such soft gripper can self-adapt the size of its effective suction area with respect to the applied load. The elastomeric membrane covering edge of the soft gripper can develop an air-tight self-sealing with parts even smaller than the gripper diameter. Such gripper shows 4 times higher adhesion than the one without the membrane on various textured surfaces. The two major advantages, underactuated self-adaptability and enhanced suction performance, allow the membrane-based suction mechanism to grip various three-dimensional (3D) geometries and delicate parts, such as egg, lime, apple, and even hydrogels without noticeable damage, which can have not been gripped with the previous adhesive microstructures-based and active suction-based soft grippers. The structural and material simplicity of the proposed soft gripper design can have a broad use in diverse fields, such as digital manufacturing, robotic manipulation, transfer printing, and medical gripping.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1002/advs.202100641
Web of Science ID

WOS:000669261400001

Author(s)
Song, Sukho  
Drotlef, Dirk-Michael
Son, Donghoon
Koivikko, Anastasia
Sitti, Metin
Date Issued

2021-07-03

Published in
Advanced Science
Article Number

2100641

Subjects

Chemistry, Multidisciplinary

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Nanoscience & Nanotechnology

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Materials Science, Multidisciplinary

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Chemistry

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Science & Technology - Other Topics

•

Materials Science

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rubber friction

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self-sealing

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soft grippers

•

soft robotics

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suction cups

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adhesive interfaces

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rubber

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surfaces

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objects

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shape

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cups

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LSBI  
Available on Infoscience
July 17, 2021
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/180104
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