Soft Gripping: Specifying for Trustworthiness

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of developing comprehensive specifications for soft robotic systems, particularly soft grippers, to ensure trustworthiness through functional, non-functional, and verifiability considerations.

Contribution

It presents an extensive example specification for a soft gripper, addressing functional, non-functional, and ethical requirements to promote trustworthiness and verifiability.

Findings

Proposed a detailed specification covering safety, reliability, and ethics.

Highlighted the importance of verifiability in soft robotics design.

Demonstrated the need for formal specifications in soft robotic development.

Abstract

Soft robotics is an emerging technology in which engineers create flexible devices for use in a variety of applications. In order to advance the wide adoption of soft robots, ensuring their trustworthiness is essential; if soft robots are not trusted, they will not be used to their full potential. In order to demonstrate trustworthiness, a specification needs to be formulated to define what is trustworthy. However, even for soft robotic grippers, which is one of the most mature areas in soft robotics, the soft robotics community has so far given very little attention to formulating specifications. In this work, we discuss the importance of developing specifications during development of soft robotic systems, and present an extensive example specification for a soft gripper for pick-and-place tasks for grocery items. The proposed specification covers both functional and non-functional requirements, such as reliability, safety, adaptability, predictability, ethics, and regulations. We also highlight the need to promote verifiability as a first-class objective in the design of a soft gripper.