Design and Development of a Monolithic Gripper with Flexural Joints for Macroscale Manipulation

Abstract

This paper presents a robotic gripper design which enacts flexural joints rather than prismatic and revolute joints to ensure gripping action. The designed flexure based gripper exhibits large displacement than is normally possible with such joint-types in effect. With large displacements, the gripper used to handle kiwifruit and at the same time determine its softness. Flexural joint mechanism is based on the intrinsic compliancy of a material to achieve structural elastic deformation and execute the requisite displacement. The monolithic model is designed to demand more lumped compliancy displacement than distributed compliancy. The feasibility of the design is examined through a series of numerical analysis and simulations on COMSOL platform leading to subtractive fabrication of the prototype. Keywords—flexure joints, large displacement, lumped compliancy, monolithic.