Strategy of Picking Up Thin Plate by Robot Hand Using Deformation of Soft Fingertip

In this paper, grasping strategy using deformation of soft finger is addressed. Soft fingers, which are made of macromolecular and have large elastic deformation, have gotten a lot of attention. Soft fingers have a peculiarity that high friction force, which stabilizes a grasping condition, is generated by expansion of contact area between tip of soft finger and grasping object. However, until now nobody focuses on the fact that deformation of soft finger enables multi-fingered hand to generate force to manipulate a object which has high aspect ratio and restricted by environment. Accordingly, we focus on a task to pick up a thin plate on a floor using deformation of soft finger. The effectiveness of grasping strategy is confirmed by experiments.