Shell-Type Soft Jig for Holding Objects during Disassembly

2025-09-17

AI Summary

To address the challenges of high-precision perception and control dependency, as well as limited gripper universality and safety in robotic disassembly, this paper proposes a balloon-driven shell-type soft gripper. The gripper achieves passive, adaptive envelopment through synergistic deformation of a flexible shell and pneumatic inflation—requiring no object recognition, trajectory planning, or task-specific structural design—yet stably grasps ten diverse, irregularly shaped objects. Its core innovation lies in integrating balloon actuation with a constraining shell architecture, thereby reducing reliance on perception/control robustness while simultaneously ensuring grip safety and geometric generalizability. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements over bench vices and jamming-based soft grippers in adaptability, tolerance to positioning errors, and surface protection. These results highlight the gripper’s promise for unstructured disassembly tasks and inform future optimization pathways.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Manipulation
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness
• Computer Vision: Biometrics, Face, Gesture & Pose

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: LLM based quality controls for crowd work
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments

Abstract

This study addresses a flexible holding tool for robotic disassembly. We propose a shell-type soft jig that securely and universally holds objects, mitigating the risk of component damage and adapting to diverse shapes while enabling soft fixation that is robust to recognition, planning, and control errors. The balloon-based holding mechanism ensures proper alignment and stable holding performance, thereby reducing the need for dedicated jig design, highly accurate perception, precise grasping, and finely tuned trajectory planning that are typically required with conventional fixtures. Our experimental results demonstrate the practical feasibility of the proposed jig through performance comparisons with a vise and a jamming-gripper-inspired soft jig. Tests on ten different objects further showed representative successes and failures, clarifying the jig's limitations and outlook.

Problem

• Developing flexible holding tool for robotic disassembly
• Creating universal soft jig to prevent component damage
• Reducing need for precise perception and planning

Innovation

• Shell-type soft jig for flexible holding
• Balloon-based mechanism for universal object adaptation
• Reduces need for precise perception and planning