Structural design and simulation analysis of tomato soft picking manipulator

Aiming at the existing picking manipulator's fingers are primarily integrated with rigid materials, which have the problem of poor flexibility and self-adaptability, this study designs a multi-chamber soft picking manipulator for tomato picking. The structural model of the soft body picking manipulator is established, and the mathematical model of the single chamber is constructed using the strain energy density function, the principle of virtual work and the volume solution method, otherwise, it is concluded that the pressure in the finger chamber is positively correlated with the bending angle in the material’s limit range. Yeoh’s third order and control variable method are used in workbench finite element simulation to simulate and analyze the finger’s structure model. The simulation results demonstrate the ideal combinations of parameters for the finger: 6 chambers, the chamber spacing is 6mm and the chamber wall thickness is 3mm; The fingers intracavity pressure can pick tomatoes when the minimum pressure is 0.03MPa, and it can pick fruits similar to the shape of the tomato. Additionally the soft picking robot model has some degree of universality, providing new models and parameters for fruit and vegetable picking robots.