Abstract:
The soft gripper can deform under external stimuli, and has a good application in the fields of cargo transportation. However, the current soft gripper has a slow response speed, and cannot adapt to most scenarios like a human hand to move the cargoes with various shapes and weights. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a soft gripper with fast response speed and adaptation for various cargoes. In this work, a hard magnetic material—Neodymium-Iron-Boron powder (NdFeB) was blended with a room temperature vulcanized rubber (RTV rubber) to form a printable magnetically responsive NdFeB-RTV rubber composite. Through the exploration and optimization of the manufacturing process-related parameters of the direct ink writing technology, the precursor ink of the NdFeB-RTV rubber composite could be accurately printed into various shapes. The material exhibits excellent mechanical properties after curing: The elongation at break is close to 300%, the tensile strength is 1.03 MPa, the tensile Young's modulus is 1.27 MPa, the flexural strength is 78.06 MPa, and the flexural modulus is 160.96 MPa. Finally, the direct ink writing technology was used to design and manufacture a magnetically responsive four-arm gripper robot. Using the magnetic actuation and flexibility characteristics of the robot, functions such as soft deformation, fast grasping, and smooth transportation are realized.