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Grasping of fragile objects, such agricultural products, is a currently active area of research which is advancing continuously throughout the years. Although proven versatility has been achieved through conventional robotic gripper, the recent favourable option is to utilized soft robotic grippers to hold various shapes and interacting with unstructured environments. The principal concept of soft grippers is to be able to handle or manipulate various fragile items without harming the object. This study introduced a structured printable soft vacuum actuator that is covered by a commercially available latex balloon as the membrane. These actuators are directly manufactured into segmented soft robotic fingers using commercially affordable fused deposition modelling (FDM) 3D printer. Due to its flexible structural deformation, the task could be achieved without additional complication like their rigid-bodied counterparts. In this study, the behaviour of these actuators is predicted using numerical analysis in finite element modelling. Furthermore, several structures have been investigated in order to observe any relation between the stress distributions on the material surface, to the actuator shape. Some advantages acquire from this development are its economical production cost, vastly available material, straight-forward fabrication, and large payload to weight ratio. While the gripper only weighs approximately 63 grams, is capable of lifting to 800 grams load. It is clearly shown from the simulated result; those specific configurations could give an optimized design of up to 50% for motion and repetitive actuation.

Simulation-Based Analysis on Novel Vacuum Actuation Concept for Soft Robotic Finger Development