Suction grasping is widely used in the industry, especially for pick-and-place operations. We aim to increase the usability of the suction gripper on irregular-shaped objects.
Smart Suction Gripper with tactile sensing capability
We redesigned the industry-standard suction cup to have four internal flow paths, where the local suction leakage flow can be monitored by the remote pressure sensors. This local suction leakage monitoring enables haptic exploration for better grasping points and prediction of suction seal break during manipulation.
Related Paper: Huh, Tae Myung, Kate Sanders, Michael Danielczuk, Monica Li, Yunliang Chen, Ken Goldberg, and Hannah S. Stuart. “A multi-chamber smart suction cup for adaptive gripping and haptic exploration.” In 2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 1786-1793. IEEE, 2021. (URL) (Preprint)