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Computational design of passive grippers

Published: 22 July 2022 Publication History
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  • Editorial Notes

    The authors have requested minor, non-substantive changes to the Version of Record and, in accordance with ACM policies, a Corrected Version of Record was published on August 1, 2022. For reference purposes, the VoR may still be accessed via the Supplemental Material section on this page.

    Abstract

    This work proposes a novel generative design tool for passive grippers---robot end effectors that have no additional actuation and instead leverage the existing degrees of freedom in a robotic arm to perform grasping tasks. Passive grippers are used because they offer interesting trade-offs between cost and capabilities. However, existing designs are limited in the types of shapes that can be grasped. This work proposes to use rapid-manufacturing and design optimization to expand the space of shapes that can be passively grasped. Our novel generative design algorithm takes in an object and its positioning with respect to a robotic arm and generates a 3D printable passive gripper that can stably pick the object up. To achieve this, we address the key challenge of jointly optimizing the shape and the insert trajectory to ensure a passively stable grasp. We evaluate our method on a testing suite of 22 objects (23 experiments), all of which were evaluated with physical experiments to bridge the virtual-to-real gap. Code and data are at https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~milink/passive-gripper/

    Supplementary Material

    3530162-vor (3530162-vor.pdf)
    Version of Record for "Computational design of passive grippers" by Kodnongbua et al., ACM Transactions on Graphics, Volume 41, Issue 4 (TOG 41:4).
    MP4 File (3528223.3530162.mp4)
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    Cited By

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    • (2024)Diversity‐Based Topology Optimization of Soft Robotic GrippersAdvanced Intelligent Systems10.1002/aisy.2023005056:4Online publication date: 18-Jan-2024
    • (2023)Design and Validation of a Push-Latch Gripper Made in Additive ManufacturingIEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics10.1109/TMECH.2023.327607328:4(2083-2091)Online publication date: Aug-2023
    • (2023)Towards Task-Specific Modular Gripper Fingers: Automatic Production of Fingertip MechanicsIEEE Robotics and Automation Letters10.1109/LRA.2023.32417578:3(1866-1873)Online publication date: Mar-2023
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    1. Computational design of passive grippers

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      Published In

      cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
      ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 41, Issue 4
      July 2022
      1978 pages
      ISSN:0730-0301
      EISSN:1557-7368
      DOI:10.1145/3528223
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 22 July 2022
      Published in TOG Volume 41, Issue 4

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      Author Tags

      1. additive manufacturing
      2. fabrication
      3. generative design
      4. passive gripper

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      View all
      • (2024)Diversity‐Based Topology Optimization of Soft Robotic GrippersAdvanced Intelligent Systems10.1002/aisy.2023005056:4Online publication date: 18-Jan-2024
      • (2023)Design and Validation of a Push-Latch Gripper Made in Additive ManufacturingIEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics10.1109/TMECH.2023.327607328:4(2083-2091)Online publication date: Aug-2023
      • (2023)Towards Task-Specific Modular Gripper Fingers: Automatic Production of Fingertip MechanicsIEEE Robotics and Automation Letters10.1109/LRA.2023.32417578:3(1866-1873)Online publication date: Mar-2023
      • (2023)Learn to Grasp Via Intention Discovery and Its Application to Challenging ClutterIEEE Robotics and Automation Letters10.1109/LRA.2022.32284438:2(488-495)Online publication date: Feb-2023
      • (2023)Parallel-Jaw Gripper and Grasp Co-Optimization for Sets of Planar Objects2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10342241(2455-2462)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2023

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