Electroadhesion based High-Payload Soft Gripper with Mechanically Strengthened Structure

This paper proposes a reinforced soft gripper with a mechanically strengthened electroadhesion pad and a multi-layered dielectric elastomer (DE) actuator, for practical robotic application. The reinforcement of the electroadhesion pad is achieved by a metallic electrode pattern printed on a flexible polyimide film, which has a higher elastic modulus than typical soft materials. Moreover, the multi-layered DE actuator is used to increase the bending force of the soft gripper. We maximized the gripper performance by optimizing design factors of the electroadhesion and multi-layered DE through experimental and simulation analysis. In this study, we demonstrated dynamic picking up and placing tasks with the designed gripper assembled to a robotic manipulator. The gripper can lift and move various shaped objects 100 times heavier than the gripper's mass of 6.2 g. Moreover, the soft gripper with a large area can firmly hold 16.8 kg, with optimized specifications.