SoftHandler: An Integrated Soft Robotic System for Handling Heterogeneous Objects

The picking performance of a robot can be severely affected by measurement errors, especially when handling objects that are fragile or irregular in shape and size. This is one of the main reasons that the problem of autonomously picking and placing objects is not solved. In this article, we exploit the “embodied” intelligence of soft robotic technologies to propose an integrated system, named SoftHandler, capable of overcoming some of the limitations of traditional pick-and-place industrial robots. The SoftHandler (Figure 1) integrates a novel parallel soft manipulator, the SoftDelta, and a novel soft end effector, the Pisa/(Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia) IIT SoftGripper.