3D Printed Gripper Doesn’t Need Electronics to Operate

A team of roboticists at Jacobs School of Engineering, University of California-San Diego (USCSD), collaborated with researchers at BASF Corp. to create the first 3D printed gripper.

Grippers are used mostly in a pick-and-place environment at the product packaging stage in food, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and other industries.

This soft robotic gripper is 3D printed in one print and works without electronics.

The researchers wanted to design a soft gripper that would be ready to use right off the 3D printer, equipped with built in gravity and touch sensors. The gripper can pick up, hold, and release objects.

“We designed functions so that a series of valves would allow the gripper to both grip on contact and release at the right time,” said Yichen Zhai, a postdoctoral researcher in the Bioinspired Robotics and Design Lab at the USCSD and the leading author of the paper, published in Science Robotics. The paper, "Desktop Fabrication of Monolithic Soft Robotic Devices with Embedded Fluidic Control Circuits," was published June 21, 2023.

“It’s the first time such a gripper can both grip and release. All you have to do is turn the gripper horizontally. This triggers a change in the airflow in the valves, making the two fingers of the gripper release,” Zhai added.

Watch a video of the 3D gripper in action here.

This fluidic logic allows the robot to remember when it has grasped an object and is holding on to it. When it detects the weight of the object pushing to the side as it is rotating to the horizontal, it releases the object. 

Soft grippers have been around for a while, allowing robots to interact safely with humans and delicate objects.

This gripper can be mounted on a robotic arm for industrial manufacturing applications, food production, and the handling of fruits and vegetables. It can also be mounted onto a robot for research and exploration tasks.

Regarding a power source, as it doesn’t need electronics, the gripper can function untethered, with a bottle of high-pressure gas as its only source of power. 

When connected to a constant supply of air pressure, the gripper autonomously detected and gripped an object and released the object when it detected a force due to the weight of the object acting perpendicular to the gripper.

Typical desktop-fused filament fabrication (FFF) 3D-printed soft robots often have a certain degree of stiffness; contain a large number of leaks when they come off the printer; and need a fair amount of processing and assembly after printing to be usable. This also limits their applications.

The team overcame these obstacles by developing a new 3D printing method, which involves the printer nozzle tracing a continuous path through the entire pattern of each layer printed.

“It’s like drawing a picture without ever lifting the pencil off the page,” said Michael T. Tolley, an associate professor in the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. 

This method reduces the likelihood of leaks and defects in the printed piece, which are very common when printing with soft materials. 

The new method also allows for printing of thin walls, down to 0.5 mm in thickness. The thinner walls and complex, curved shapes allow for a higher range of deformation, resulting in a softer structure overall.

Researchers based the method on the Eulerian path, which in graph theory is a trail in a graph that touches every edge of that graph once and once only. 

“When we followed these rules, we were able to consistently print functional pneumatic soft robots with embedded control circuits,” said Tolley. 

Researchers from USCSD include Yichen Zhain, Jioayao Yan, Benjamin Shih, Michael T. Tolley. And those with BASF are Albert De Boer, Martin Faber, Joshua Speros, Rohini Gupta.