Picking up operation of thin objects by robot arm with two-fingered parallel soft gripper

Abstract

One of the tasks which we expect executing by home service robots is a handling of thin objects like papers or plastic cards. It is a difficult task for the home service robots to pick up a thin object placed on the table, because it needs high dexterity. To achieve this motion by home service robots, we used a two-fingered parallel soft gripper with a soft nail, and constructed a sequence of picking up operation of a paper or a plastic card by a robot arm. The constructed sequence consists of sliding motion and raising motion. The robot slides a paper or a card and hooks its nail at the side of it, and raises one side of it, and picks it up like humans. In this paper, we propose a sequence of picking up operation of a paper or a plastic card on the table derived from the analysis of human motions, and confirm its availability through experiments.