For the mechanical engineering course “introduction to technological research” we created a test setup to research the correlation between holding force and the size of granular material in a granular gripper. A granular gripper is a simple and cheap alternative for standard robotics grippers. It has the ability to pick up complex objects with relative ease.
A granular gripper uses the principle of granular jamming to pick up an object. Imagine a pack of ground coffee beans that are vacuum packed. While it’s packed it’s hard like a brick, but once you open it it turns soft.
Working principle of a granular gripper.
Since we had to perform a lot of tests with different granular materials we wanted to create a test setup that could perform multiple tests at a fast pace while logging all the data automatically. Using the arduino platform we build a setup that could operate the vacuum pump, track the pressure inside the valves and automatically log all the data to the laptop using Matlab.
You can view the results and code on github.
We would like to thank the designlab staff for all the help and guidance they provided us during the course of this project.
