Optimized design and performance study of internal nested structure based on Fin Ray structure

Abstract As a famous type of passive soft gripper, fin ray gripper is easily adaptable to object shapes and compatible with various actuation mechanisms. Also, it has been shown that internally embedded substructures can significantly affect the adaptability and gripping performance of fin ray grippers. In the current contribution, a new design of the fin ray gripper is proposed with a smaller version for the fin ray gripper internally embedded. The kineto-static properties of the proposed fin ray gripper are analyzed computationally and experimentally. It is found that the proposed fin ray gripper shows variable stiffness properties along its length. It can adapt to different grasping situations with the choice of grasping location. Additionally, unbalanced grasping performances of the proposed fin ray gripper are explored, showing that it manages to grasp unbalanced objects with higher efficiency than conventional fin ray gripper. The current contribution provides a deeper understanding of soft passive grippers and figures out the possible role of unbalanced grasping in the real-world applications of soft grippers.