An Octopus-Inspired Bionic Flexible Gripper for Apple Grasping

Jie Pi, Jun Liu, Kehong Zhou and Mingyan Qian
Additional contact information
Jie Pi: Institute of Agricultural Facilities and Equipment, Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Key Laboratory of Protected Agriculture Engineering in the Middle and Lower Reaches of Yangtze River Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Nanjing 210014, China
Jun Liu: Institute of Agricultural Facilities and Equipment, Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Key Laboratory of Protected Agriculture Engineering in the Middle and Lower Reaches of Yangtze River Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Nanjing 210014, China
Kehong Zhou: Institute of Agricultural Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212001, China
Mingyan Qian: Institute of Agricultural Facilities and Equipment, Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Key Laboratory of Protected Agriculture Engineering in the Middle and Lower Reaches of Yangtze River Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Nanjing 210014, China

Agriculture, 2021, vol. 11, issue 10, 1-16

Abstract: When an octopus grasps something, the rigidity of its tentacle can change greatly, which allowing for unlimited freedom, agility, and precision. Inspired by this, a three-finger flexible bionic robot gripper was designed for apple picking. First, a flexible chamber finger was designed to drive the gripper finger to elongate, shorten, and bend, which works through a process of inflating and deflating. Further, we proposed a three-finger mode to achieve two kinds of motion states: grasping and relaxing, by simulating the movement of an octopus grasping at something. In this paper, we evaluated the bending property of the designed flexible bionic gripper through an apple grasping experiment. The experimental results show that the 100.0 g bionic gripper can load an apple with a weight of 246.5~350.0 g and a diameter of 69.0~99.0 mm, and the grasping success rate is 100%. It has a good grasping performance. Compared to other soft grippers, the proposed bionic flexible gripper has the advantages of being lightweight, and having good cushioning, low driving air pressure, and a strong grasping force.

Keywords: octopus tentacles; bionic flexible gripper; pneumatic drive; agriculture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/11/10/1014/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/11/10/1014/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jagris:v:11:y:2021:i:10:p:1014-:d:658333

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture is currently edited by Ms. Leda Xuan

More articles in Agriculture from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().