Adaptive Gripper with Magnetic Gear for Grasping Atypical Objects

This paper proposes an adaptive gripper for atypical objects. This gripper is designed to drive three fingers with one motor by applying three adaptive two-joint fingers developed in our previous research. The gripper with a single motor has the advantage of reduced weight, and the non-contact finger can be continuously driven by utilizing the characteristics of the magnetic gear when grasping an atypical object. A prototype of the adaptive gripper was manufactured with a 3-D printed body and link. It was confirmed that the adaptive grasping of the gripper worked in a limited driving torque range in the experiment. The gripper could grasp atypical objects such as tomatoes and oriental melons with torque control. Finally, it was confirmed that the performance of the gripper could be controlled by the torque control and the gap between the magnetic gear.