A soft cable loop based gripper for robotic automation of chemistry

Lupo Manes; Sebastiano Fichera; Hatem Fakhruldeen; Andrew I Cooper; Paolo Paoletti

doi:10.1038/s41598-024-59372-1

A soft cable loop based gripper for robotic automation of chemistry

Sci Rep. 2024 Apr 17;14(1):8899. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-59372-1.

Authors

Lupo Manes^{1

2}, Sebastiano Fichera³, Hatem Fakhruldeen⁴, Andrew I Cooper⁴, Paolo Paoletti³

Affiliations

¹ Leverhulme Research Centre for Functional Materials Discovery, Material Innovation Factory, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 7ZD, UK. L.Manes@liverpool.ac.uk.
² School of Engineering, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3GH, UK. L.Manes@liverpool.ac.uk.
³ School of Engineering, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3GH, UK.
⁴ Leverhulme Research Centre for Functional Materials Discovery, Material Innovation Factory, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 7ZD, UK.

Abstract

Robotic automation is proving itself indispensable in the modern Chemistry laboratory, but adoption is slowed down by the technical challenges of implementing such systems. This paper reports on a novel adaptive gripper mechanism that can easily and reliably grasp cylindrical and prismatic objects of various sizes with limited clearance required. The proposed design exploits the inherent compliance of a cable that is driven to fully envelope the target object. The cable is run through a rigid finger, allowing the loop to be placed around objects with minimal clearance required and to provide support for the object once the grip is complete. Thanks to the compliant nature of the mechanism, the gripper requires minimal control effort to complete a gasping task. A prototype of the gripper has been designed and built for chemistry automation tasks, where it showed very high grasp reliability with $\leq 1 %$ grasp failures.