Experimental evaluation and comparison of low-cost adaptive mechatronic grippers

Nowadays, robotic systems are not an exclusive of the industry environment anymore. Indeed, in the last decades, they assumed an important role in other application fields such as medicine (e.g. robot-assisted surgery) and agriculture (e.g. fruit picking). To meet the requirements of these new fields of application, this transition has involved both an adaptation of old-technologies and the development of new ones. In the agricultural field, the objects to be manipulated are usually characterized by non-uniform shapes, dimensions and weights. Moreover, they are typically soft and fragile, so they need to be handled with care. To accomplish these requirements, several types of new grippers have been created or adapted, also thanks to recent developments in manufacturing technologies and materials. However, many of these innovative grippers are either at a prototyping stage or expensive. This applied-research work wants to investigate the innovative available low-cost grippers able to deal with objects of different dimensions, weights and surface conformation, which could be employed in productive sectors such as agriculture. In particular, the few information (i.e. maximum object diameter and weight, durability) given by producers are supplemented with data on gripper capability to handle statically and dynamically objects with the aforementioned characteristics. Such data have been obtained through several experimental tests (i.e. pick & place operations) and provide a set of gripper-characteristic-maps that allows evaluating the gripper adequacy for a given application.