Vacuum-Driven Soft Grippers for Delicate Grasping: A Raspberry Harvesting Case

This thesis presents the development of a vacuum-actuated soft gripper designed for the gentle manipulation of fragile objects, with raspberry harvesting as a use case. The work encompasses the gripper's design, modeling, fabrication, and validation. Inspired by muscle-like pneumatic structures (VAMPs), the gripper features a cylindrical configuration to ensure stable and delicate grasping of objects. Finite Element Modeling (FEM) was employed to analyze structural behavior, focusing on radial contraction and stress distribution under vacuum actuation. A physical prototype was fabricated and tested using a sensorized raspberry physical twin to evaluate the gripper's performance in terms of applied forces and potential damage to the fruit. Field tests demonstrated the gripper's effectiveness in real-world conditions, followed by integration into a teleoperated robotic harvesting system. This work advances soft robotics in agriculture, offering an innovative solution for handling delicate crops and setting the stage for broader applications in automated systems.