Development of Hydraulically-driven Soft Hand for Handling Heavy Vegetables and its Experimental Evaluation

In this study, we develop a hydraulically-driven soft robotic hand for handling heavy vegetables in a vegetable factory and report its experimental validations. The working population in agriculture is decreasing worldwide, creating a lot of demands for the robotic automation in harvest and transportation of agricultural produces. In particular, a vegetable factory deals with large and heavy vegetables, e.g., cabbages, with 2-3 kg weight and 20-30 cm diameter. A soft robot hand is suitable for handling a food or vegetable; however, most of existing soft robot hands cannot generate necessary output because they are usually actuated by the air-pressure. Therefore, we employ the hydraulic actuation for our soft hand to generate 1 or 2 MPa pressure. Using the developed soft hand, we report experimental validations including basic control performance evaluation and grasping experiments assuming a vegetable factory environment.