  In this paper, design and development of a sensor integrated adaptive gripper
is presented. Adaptive grippers are useful for grasping objects of varied
geometric shapes by wrapping fingers around the object. The finger closing
sequence in adaptive grippers may lead to ejection of the object from the
gripper due to any unbalanced grasping force and such grasp failure is common
for lightweight objects. Designing of the proposed gripper is focused on
ensuring stable grasp on a wide variety of objects, especially, for lightweight
objects (e.g., empty plastic bottles). The actuation mechanism is based on
movable pulleys and tendon wires which ensure that once a link stops moving,
the other links continue to move and wrap around the object. Further,
optimisation is used to improve the design of the adaptive gripper. Finally,
validation is done by executing object grasping in a simulated environment
PyBullet for simple pick and place tasks on common household objects.
