Design and development of a soft gripper system for difficult-to-handle food items

Abstract

There are many food products or handling operations, such as grasping food materials with less thickness and extremely delicate, which cannot be performed using existing soft grippers. As a result, these operations are eventually left for human laborers to perform. In this paper, we present a novel soft gripper that takes advantage of the integration of a soft gripper mechanism with higher holding force and reconfigurable plate to grasp especially fewer thickness foods. There is a mechanism to adjust the gripper arms which can be performed inside a higher reconfigurable working area. This gripper can grip less thick and delicate foods compared to conventional grippers while maintaining a higher grasping success rate. A prototype of the gripper was evaluated in an experimental setup, where real ingredients were used. The gripper demonstrated versatile grasping capabilities, allowing for a wide range of foods to be handled effectively. A maximum bending angle of the gripper 41°was obtained without load for the applied pressure values. The gripper exhibited a maximum pulling force of 18.2 N at a 40 kPa (abs) pressure. These innovative concepts suggest that this approach to food handling holds a significant contribution to delicate food handling in automated food production.