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Computational design of passive grippers

Published:22 July 2022Publication History
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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.

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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/

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      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

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      • Published: 22 July 2022
      Published in tog Volume 41, Issue 4

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