Development of the flexible robot gripper actuated by pneumatic muscles

One of important requirement of a robot gripper is grasping objects in a safe and compliant way, pneumatic muscles can be used for this purpose owing to their similar features like natural muscles. In this paper, a new type of robot gripper with two fingers actuated by 4 pieces of pneumatic muscle is presented. After describing the mechanical structure and working principle, the force model of the single pneumatic muscle is established by experiment data, on the basis of this, the static model of the finger ' s grasping force is build. Experimental results reveal that the grasping force is regulated linearly by the internal pressure of the flexor muscle, and results also validate the gripper can do accurate grasping operation with good flexibility and compliance.