A Multi-Chamber Smart Suction Cup for Adaptive Gripping and Haptic Exploration

We present a novel robot end-effector for gripping and haptic exploration. Tactile sensing through suction flow monitoring is achieved with a new suction cup design that contains multiple chambers for air flow. Each chamber connects with its own remote pressure transducer, which enables both absolut...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Huh, Tae Myung, Sanders, Kate, Danielczuk, Michael, Li, Monica, Chen, Yunliang, Goldberg, Ken, Stuart, Hannah S.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
End effectors
Geometry
Haptic interfaces
Robot sensing systems
Seals
Sensors
Transducers
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Request full text
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Summary:We present a novel robot end-effector for gripping and haptic exploration. Tactile sensing through suction flow monitoring is achieved with a new suction cup design that contains multiple chambers for air flow. Each chamber connects with its own remote pressure transducer, which enables both absolute and differential pressure measures between chambers. By changing the overall vacuum applied to this smart suction cup, it can perform different functions such as gentle haptic exploration (low pressure) and monitoring breaks in the seal during strong astrictive gripping (high pressure). Haptic exploration of surfaces through sliding and palpation can guide the selection of suction grasp locations and help to identify the local surface geometry. During suction gripping, a trained LSTM network can localize breaks in the suction seal between four quadrants with up to 97% accuracy and detects breaks in the suction seal early enough to avoid total grasp failure.
ISSN:2153-0866
DOI:10.1109/IROS51168.2021.9635852