Soft-Jig-Driven Assembly Operations
This addresses the challenge of flexible assembly automation for robotics, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing soft robotics concepts like jamming grippers.
The paper tackled the problem of designing a general-purpose assembly robot system to handle objects of various shapes by proposing a soft jig that adapts to part shapes, achieving evaluation in fixing performance and versatility for different shapes and postures.
To design a general-purpose assembly robot system that can handle objects of various shapes, we propose a soft jig that fits to the shapes of assembly parts. The functionality of the soft jig is based on a jamming gripper developed in the field of soft robotics. The soft jig has a bag covered with a malleable silicone membrane, which has high friction, elongation, and contraction rates for keeping parts fixed. The bag is filled with glass beads to achieve a jamming transition. We propose a method to configure parts-fixing on the soft jig based on contact relations, reachable directions, and the center of gravity of the parts that are fixed on the jig. The usability of the soft jig was evaluated in terms of the fixing performance and versatility for various shapes and postures of parts.