This research proposes and validates a novel grasping principle to be able to set caging grasps in cluttered environments. A prototype is designed making use of manoeuvering fingers which propagate along the object surface and are covered with everting belts to minimize slip and
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This research proposes and validates a novel grasping principle to be able to set caging grasps in cluttered environments. A prototype is designed making use of manoeuvering fingers which propagate along the object surface and are covered with everting belts to minimize slip and thus friction forces on the object and environment. Using several lab setups, it is shown that the designed gripper fingers closely follow spherical objects, and do so while exerting only negligible normal and friction forces on the object or surrounding clutter. Furthermore, the gripper is validated with a robotic system in a practical test case of grasping tomatoes from a dense cluttered pile. The gripper successfully grasped 100% of the objects without any control effort in terms of clutter avoidance and grasp pose control. This shows that this novel strategy for setting a caging grasp makes grasping difficult objects in cluttered environments robust and highly successful.
