Research On Soft Gripper Of Service Robot Based On Honeycomb PneuNets

With the rapid development of science and technology, robot has gradually enter into vision of the public. In industry, robot can do some dull or dangerous work for human. In areas of life, robot has become human’s assistant to provide some service or entertainment. While the robotics is developing, the performance development has reached some bottlenecks, the grasp problem of service robot is one of them.In this paper, base on the reasearch of Kejia service robot and service robot in five years, the innovation and contribution focus on the research of Kejia service robot, soft robot and grasp strategy of soft gripper. As for Kejia service robot, the rational function analysis and unique architecture design guarantee the effectiveness in home service and robust performance. As for soft robot, a new HPN soft robot structure was proposed. As for soft gripper, a new grasp strategy was proposed. A simple open-loop control can make a success grasp and can guarantee a high grasp success rate. This may raise a novel suggestion for solve the problem of service robot grasp.The first part mainly talks about the principle and design of Kejia service robot. Service robots commonly made up of two parts:chassis and manipulation platform, some robots contain some other parts to increase the service performance. Concern the service scenario and functional requirements, Kejia is driven by two concentric wheels, which can solve the problem of motion synthesis and turnning around in family narrow environment effectively. Manipulation platform is a 5-DOF robot arm and a gripper. Along with the lift system, Kejia robot can reach a wide area to manipulate objects and the interaction capability was strengthened.The second part takes HPN soft robot into concern. Soft robot is a new robot structure that has gradually get scholars’s attention. It’s commonly made up of soft materials, driven by changes of voltage, air pressure or environmental factors. Based on the characteristics of flexible material, soft robot can achieve adaptive interaction without sensors, so it has a great advantage in the operation of some soft or fragile objects, as well as with human interaction. Our team has proposed a conception of HPN. It is composed of rigid hexagonal structure as a structure skeleton and air bags embedded in the unit. Through a proper arrangement of structure, the HPN can be simultaneously used as a push and pull driver, also it has a great capabitily in deformation behavior and scaling, can be used in grasp and transport areas.The third part mainly contains a grasp strategy base on HPN soft gripper. Tradi-tionnal gripper commonly use multiple sensors at the end of gripper to grasp objects. In this paper, a new HPN soft gripper and its grasp strategy is proposed. The theoretical model of the soft gripper has infinite degrees of freedom, so it can fit the surface of the objects completely. In order to calculate the final grasp state, the grasp process is simulated at every selected grasp point according to the characteristics of motion and grasp. For every final grasp state, the decision point is taken to get the feasible solution set using the relative form closure theory. For each feasible solution, the evaluation function for the HPN soft gripper is calculated. Then the best solution is selected to get the best grasp plan. The experimental results showed that the new soft gripper and its grasp strategy had improved the grasp success rate on common geometrical objects.