Design of a Pneumatic Muscle-Actuated Compliant Gripper System with a Single Mobile Jaw

The paper presents an innovative theoretical concept of a bio-inspired soft gripper system with two parallel jaws, a fixed and a mobile one. It is conceived for gripping fragile or soft objects with complex, irregular shapes that are easily deformable. This novel gripper is designed for handling small objects of masses up to 0.5 kg. The maximum gripping stroke of the mobile jaw is 13.5 mm. The driving motor is a pneumatic muscle, an actuator with inherently compliant, spring-like behavior. Compliance is the feature responsible for the soft character of the gripper system, ensuring its passive adaptability to the nature of the object to be gripped. The paper presents the structural, kinematic, static, and dynamic models of the novel gripper system and describes the compliant behavior of the entire assembly. The results of the dynamic simulation of the gripper have confirmed the attaining of the imposed motion-related performance.