Fire Resistance Deformable Soft Gripper Based on Wire Jamming Mechanism

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fire-resistant soft gripper utilizing a wire jamming mechanism with incombustible materials, enabling safe grasping of sharp or burning objects, which is an advancement over traditional silicone-based soft grippers.

Contribution

The authors propose a novel wire jamming-based variable stiffness mechanism with incombustible materials, suitable for fire environments and objects with sharp edges.

Findings

Demonstrated effective grasping of sharp and burning objects.

Showed the mechanism's fire resistance and cut resistance.

Validated the gripper's performance through experiments.

Abstract

Able to grasp objects of any shape and size, universal grippers using variable stiffness phenomenon such as granular jamming have been developed for disaster robotics application. However, as their contact interface is mainly composed of unrigid and burnable silicone rubber, conventional soft grippers are not applicable to objects with sharp sections such as broken valves and glass fragments, especially on fire. In this research, the authors proposed a new method of variable stiffness mechanism using a string of beads that can be composed of cut-resistant and incombustible metals, arrange the mechanism to form a torus gripper, and conducted experiments to show its effectiveness.