Kevin Wu
Development of an Origami-Inspired Bistable Soft Robotic Gripper
The increasing demand for high-quality, delicate agricultural products like fruits and vegetables requires innovative harvesting solutions due to the limitations of manual labor. Traditional robotic grippers often fail to handle these items gently, causing bruise damage. This poster presents an origami-inspired bistable soft robotic gripper designed to address this challenge by providing a gentle and adaptive grasp of soft fruits – peaches. Utilizing a bistable mechanism, the gripper can remain in two stable states without continuous power input, automatically closing when contacting an object, thus reducing the need for active control. The gripper’s design includes parameters such as valley width, height, and wall thickness to optimize performance. Through a series of tests and simulations using SolidWorks and Abaqus CAE, the gripper demonstrated the ability to handle peaches without causing bruising. The final design, featuring a combination of rigid and soft materials for the fingers and a strategically positioned elastic ring, ensures efficient and damage-free fruit handling. This innovative approach not only enhances the efficiency of automated agricultural operations but also contributes to the production of higher-quality produce. Future work will focus on integrating the gripper components into a single part and further optimizing gripping parameters.