Final Design Summary & Analysis
The article "This soft robotic gripper can screw in your light bulbs for you", (2017), a team of engineers at the University of California, San Diego (USCD), designed and built a soft robotic grip and its features. The soft robotic gripper can "pick up and manipulate objects without needing to see them and needing to be trained." It has three fingers made of pneumatic chambers which, have multiple degrees of freedom allowing manipulation of the held object. Each finger is covered with a "smart sensing skin made of silicone rubber" with embedded "sensors made of conducting carbon nanotubes". The sensing skin records and detects the nanotubes conductivity changes as the fingers bend. The data is then processed by the control board, which then creates a 3D model of the object the gripper is manipulating. As good as UCSD is, there are similar products with better gripping mechanism and special gripping features like the FlexShapeGripper developed ...