Soft-Bubble grippers for robust and perceptive manipulation

Understand

Manipulation in cluttered environments like homes requires stable grasps, precise placement and robustness against external contact.

• We present the Soft-Bubble gripper system with a highly compliant gripping surface and dense-geometry visuotactile sensing, capable of multiple kinds of tactile perception.
• We first present various mechanical design advances and a fabrication technique to deposit custom patterns to the internal surface of the sensor that enable tracking of shear-induced displacement of the manipuland.
• The depth maps output by the internal imaging sensor are used in an in-hand proximity pose estimation framework -- the method better captures distances to corners or edges on the manipuland geometry.