Soft Inflatable Fingers: An Overview of Design, Prototyping and Sensorisation for Various Applications

Fabric-based soft actuators, grippers and manipulators are gaining in popularity due to their ability to handle large payloads while being lightweight, extremely compliant, low-cost and fully collapsible. Achieving full-pose sensing of fabric fingers without compromising on these advantageous properties, however, remains a challenge. This paper overviews work on soft fabric-based inflatable finger design, actuation and sensorisation carried out at the Centre for Advanced Robotics at Queen Mary (ARQ), University of London. Further experimental analysis has been performed to examine features such as bending control and eversion (growing from the tip) in fabric fingers for grasping applications. In addition, two types of grasp force have been measured for a bi-fingered gripper: envelope grasping and pinch grasping. Beyond force measurement, this paper advances a new concept for the sensorisation of fabric grippers using soft optical waveguide sensors and proposes shape estimation using image processing.