A Highly Adaptive Robotic Gripper Palm with Tactile Sensing

This paper presents a novel concept and analysis of an adaptive gripper palm with a tactile sensor. The proposed gripper palm is based on an elastic spherical pack that is filled with particles. A flexible fabric pressure sensor is pasted on the surface of the pack. Without complex mechatronics design, the adaptive gripper palm can adapt to a large variety of objects based on its intrinsic compliance, which has been a challenge for most dexterous hand palm designs. Experimental results have shown that when a gripper with the proposed palm is used for grasping, contact force can be effectively estimated. Therefore, the proposed adaptive palm can be used for soft grippers that need closed-loop control.