Adaptive Compliant Gripper Finger with Embedded Contracting and Extending Actuators

Developing a gripper that can realize different shapes of its grasping surface and thus grasp different shaped objects, represents a challenging task. Compliant monolithic structures known as compliant mechanisms represent one way to obtain the gripper that can adapt its grasping surface to different shaped objects. This paper introduce a new concept of an adaptive compliant gripper finger with embedded actuators. By using embedded actuators gripper finger can change the shape of its grasping surface and achieve multiple grasping patterns. Synthesis approach for the gripper finger is also presented. It will be shown that gripper finger can realize complex grasping patterns via embedded actuators (in this paper via combination of contracting and extending actuators).