Design and prototyping of a novel gripper using PVC gel soft actuators

Soft grippers take an important role in picking up and manipulating objects for adaptive machines and facilities to achieve near-human operations. The technology of soft actuators should be one of the key issues for developing such grippers. In this study, we proposed a novel two-figure gripper using polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gel-based multilayered soft actuators. We used the contraction-expansion movement and generation force of the actuators to realize the gripper movement. A prototype gripper and a testing platform were designed, fabricated and the basic characteristics were evaluated for the pilot study. And a preliminary clamping experiment was conducted to verify the reasonability of the proposed gripper. The results show that the gripper can steadily grasp various small, lightweight, fragile, and irregular objects which demonstrated the feasibility of the practical use of the gripper.