Manipulating Adaptive Analysis and Performance Test of a Negative-Pressure Actuated Adhesive Gripper

Flexible printed circuit boards (FPCBs) are widely used in the electronic information industry. Due to their different shapes and porous, the traditional vacuum suction has problems such as leakage. Dry adhesive technology has strong potential to replace existing techniques since it provides stable handling. To this end, this paper proposes a negative pressure-driven adhesion gripper based on an annular wedge-shaped microstructure. The deformable chamber is designed to be cylindrical, which provides shear loads for annular wedge-shaped dry adhesion. The adhesion switch by shear loads and pick-and-place operations for FPCBs can be realized. During the operations, the contact state is critical for adhesion performance. To realize better contact and stability, this paper focuses on the plane adaptation technology of the negative pressure-actuation adhesion gripper, and a corrugated connector is modeled and mounted in the gripper. A series of experiments demonstrate that the adhesion becomes more stable and the adhesion force is increased by more than 20% with the designed connector. The negative pressure-actuation adhesive gripper designed in this paper can achieve reliable picking and release for flat, flexible, and thin objects, such as flexible printed circuit boards.