A Universal Jamming Gripper for Visual-based Grasping in Narrow Spaces

Although grasping objects in narrow spaces is common daily, it is difficult for a robot gripper to fulfill this task. The limited, crowded space and objects of varying shapes and surface properties are major problems, demanding a versatile gripper. This paper uses a lightweight, compact universal jamming gripper to facilitate the grasping operation. A mini camera is mounted on the gripper to capture pictures during manipulation. Besides, the rotation function is integrated into the gripper, allowing it to grasp and rotate simultaneously to remove an object from an environment with barriers and occlusions. The grasping force is tested in experiments to show the process of getting a sphere object. A visual-based grasping approach is presented and evaluated by several grasping experiments. The experiment results show that the gripper can grasp various objects and complete visual-based grasping missions, indicating that the proposed design is adequate and the gripper is versatile.