A Three-Fingered Adaptive Gripper with Multiple Grasping Modes

This paper presents an underactuated robotic gripper that consists of three fingers. This gripper is driven by seven actuators and capable of grasping a wide range of objects in different working scenarios. A combination of a four-bar mechanism and parallelograms ensures that each finger can provide the basic pinch grasp and power grasp. Detailed fingertip grasping force analysis shows the large payload of this gripper. To fulfill multiple challenging grasping tasks, the fingertip orientation of each finger was designed to be decoupled from the finger flexion motion. Particular emphasis is placed on the environmental contact-based grasp and active transition from the pinch grasp to the power grasp. Detailed analysis shows that the contact-based fingertip grasp could be used to grasp thin objects lying on a flat surface with widths less than 168 mm safely and stably. To prevent over-squeezing of the grasped object in the active transition, the fingertip orientation and finger flexion motion were controlled coordinately. Moreover, a combination of the contact-based grasp and the direct power grasp was also allowed to grasp objects lying on a flat surface and having smooth surfaces robustly. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed gripper in real-world applications.