Closed-Structure Compliant Gripper with Morphologically Optimized Multi-Material Fingertips for Aerial Grasping

Aerial grasping empowers unmanned aerial vehicles to find applications beyond structured logistics. However, it brings a number of challenges including inaccurate positioning of the end effector and limited energy sources. Moreover, solutions so far have difficulty in handling a variety of objects. A novel closed structure compliant gripper was developed to address the challenges above. The gripper has a large self-centering work envelope and is normally-closed for passive grasping. Introduction of compliance as a form of morphological computation was also considered to enhance grasping capabilities, where multi-material 3D printing would facilitate rapid design changes based on target application. To grasp different objects, the gripper has hot-swappable 3D printed fingertips which are optimized with a multi-objective Bayesian Optimization process using physical bench experiments mimicking drone grasping and ascent on a common object set. The morphology of the fingertip including tip width, curvature and distribution of soft and hard material on contact surface, are optimized with a bench test that mimics quadcopter takeoff and landing. The best design from optimization shows an improvement of more than 10% from the initial design in successful grasp operations, demonstrated by field tests with a quadcopter.