A soft cable loop based gripper for robotic automation of chemistry

Manes, Lupo ORCID: 0000-0002-5426-2925, Fichera, Sebastiano ORCID: 0000-0003-1006-4959, Fakhruldeen, Hatem, Cooper, Andrew I and Paoletti, Paolo (2024) A soft cable loop based gripper for robotic automation of chemistry. Scientific Reports, 14 (1). 8899-.

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Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Robotic automation is proving itself indispensable in the modern Chemistry laboratory, but adoption is slowed down by the technical challenges of implementing such systems. This paper reports on a novel adaptive gripper mechanism that can easily and reliably grasp cylindrical and prismatic objects of various sizes with limited clearance required. The proposed design exploits the inherent compliance of a cable that is driven to fully envelope the target object. The cable is run through a rigid finger, allowing the loop to be placed around objects with minimal clearance required and to provide support for the object once the grip is complete. Thanks to the compliant nature of the mechanism, the gripper requires minimal control effort to complete a gasping task. A prototype of the gripper has been designed and built for chemistry automation tasks, where it showed very high grasp reliability with <jats:inline-formula><jats:alternatives><jats:tex-math>$$\le 1\%$$</jats:tex-math><mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>≤</mml:mo> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> <mml:mo>%</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math></jats:alternatives></jats:inline-formula> grasp failures.</jats:p>

Item Type:	Article
Divisions:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > School of Engineering
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	18 Apr 2024 10:48
Last Modified:	25 Apr 2024 12:29
DOI:	10.1038/s41598-024-59372-1
Open Access URL:	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-59372-1
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3180430