Vacuum-Actuated Soft Robotic Fingers
Concept
The design is a combination of the three concepts, vacuum actuation, buckling, and human finger structure. We specified the size of our works according to the width of human fingers. And we hoped that buckling can lead to a short response time, large displacements, and reversible elastic deformations, which can allow the work to be used repeatedly without damages. In addition, buckling is scale-invariant, which makes the design not sensitive to mass and could therefore tolerant the manufacturing errors.
Joint Design
A single joint is a cavity with central membrane at the front and smaller membranes on both sides. Air can be drawn from the air way in the bottom.
Nonlinear FE Simulations
To verify the design, we ran nonlinear finite element simulations with Abaqus to find out the configuration after buckling. After air is drawn from the bottom, the cavity becomes nearly vacuum at the time with the side membranes buckling outwards and the central membrane buckling inwards.
Biomimetic Palm
It can hold things with large aspect ratios such as cell phones and credit cards. What’s more, it can also hold deformable objects, such as water bags and plastic packages without precise control. The biomimetic palm can also perform various gestures after adding controllable dof to each finger.