A Soft Robotic Gripper Based on Bioinspired Fingers

In the past, partly due to modeling complexities and technical constraints, fingers of soft grippers are rarely driven by high number of actuators, which leads to lack of dexterity. Here we propose a soft robotic gripper with modular anthropomorphic fingers. Each finger is actuated by four linear drivers, capable of performing forward/backward bending, and abduction/adduction motions. The piecewise constant curvature kinematic model reveals the proposed finger has an ellipsoidal shell workspace analogous to that of a human finger. Furthermore, we build a gripper using two of our modular fingers, and test dexterity and strength of the finger. Our results show that by simple control schemes, the proposed gripper can perform precision grasps and three types of in-hand manipulations that would otherwise be impossible without the addition actuation.