A new SMART gripper with soft fingers and integrated force sensors for adaptive robotic tasks

In the last decades, robotic manipulation has been treated as a cornerstone research topic to improve, accelerate but also safeguard human work in industrial, medical and everyday activities. For this reason, robotic hands are increasingly devoted to mimicking or augmenting human abilities. In particular, the two main operations performed by a human hand are precision and power grasping with the possibility of dosing the right grasping force to avoid breaks, deformations, or drops of the grasped objects. This paper presents the design, characterization and testing of a novel underactuated tendon-driven soft robotic gripper with sensing fingertips to regulate the applied contact force mimicking the ability of the human hand. The evolution of the design phases is presented and discussed together with the characterization procedures. Results of the grasping tests show the successful application of the new gripper in different tasks.