Design and Manufacturing of Soft Grippers for Robotics by Injection Molding Technology

Soft robots have softer, more flexible, and more compliant characteristics than traditional rigid robots. These qualities encourage more secure relationships between people and machines. Nevertheless, traditional robots continue to rule the commercial sector. Due to the high cost of gripper production, soft robots are very far from being commercially feasible. This research focuses on fabricating a soft robotic gripper with the potential for mass production using injection molding technology. The material used for manufacture is Thermoplastic Elastomer (TPE). This study gives an injection molding optimization strategy by using Moldex 3D simulation to minimize production time for soft grippers. Furthermore, using an Ansys workbench, this study simulated soft gripper deflections with variable pressures by finite element analysis and then compared it with the actual experiment. The simulation results of TPE warpage volume shrinkage are 11.969% and 11.96% in the molding experiment. Thus, the shrinkage and warpage for the simulation and actual experiment are similar. According to the simulation outcome, the success of TPE hollow injection molding facilitates soft gripper creation. The maximum pressure used in the FEM simulation of the bending experiment was achieved at the pressure of 50 kPa with 152.02 mm of deformation and compared to the experimental data, 145,03 mm. This error is less than 5%. Finally, a better soft gripper design was achieved by Ansys simulation, and the soft gripper appears to be ready for mass-produced by TPE injection molding.