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arXiv · 1601.04547

Towards an objective evaluation of underactuated gripper designs

Eduardo Ruiz·Walterio Mayol-Cuevas
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Abstract

In this paper we explore state-of-the-art underactuated, compliant robot gripper designs through looking at their performance on a generic grasping task. Starting from a state of the art open gripper design, we propose design modifications,and importantly, evaluate all designs on a grasping experiment involving a selection of objects resulting in 3600 object-gripper interactions. Interested in non-planned grasping but rather on a design's generic performance, we explore the influence of object shape, pose and orientation relative to the gripper and its finger number and configuration. Using open-loop grasps we achieved up to 75% success rate over our trials. The results indicate and support that under motion constraints and uncertainties and without involving grasp planning, a 2-fingered underactuated compliant hand outperforms higher multi-fingered configurations. To our knowledge this is the first extended objective comparison of various multi-fingered underactuated hand designs under generic grasping conditions.

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Eduardo Ruiz, Walterio Mayol-Cuevas. 2016-01-18. Towards an objective evaluation of underactuated gripper designs. https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.04547

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