Development of a Food Handling Soft Robot Hand Considering a High-speed Pick-and-place Task

In recent years, industrial robots have been applied to food production because of its huge potential market. Although cooking a large number of foods is done by specially designed cooking machines, dishing up the cooked foods remains a labor-intensive task. To solve this problem, we developed a new food handling robot hand consisting of simple-shaped soft actuators that can handle easily damaged natural food and convey it at high speed. In this paper, the characteristic of the developed soft actuator was shown and the bending mechanism was analyzed by the finite element method. In addition, the prototyped robot hand was evaluated by grasping and conveying experiments with some food samples.

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