Soft robotic grippers have shown significant potential in minimally invasive surgery, agriculture, and other industrial applications. For the first time, we showcase the underlyingmechanism of flexoelectric soft robotic grippers that operate under open- and closed-circuitconditions. To understand its gripping mechanism, we first formulate a flexoelectric specialCosserat rod theory that incorporates intrinsic strains such as intrinsic flexural strain, intrinsictwist, etc. The governing differential equations for the intrinsically strained flexoelectric rodhave been derived by dimensional reduction. Henceforth, we establish the constitutive relations and identify correct effective strain measures through work conjugate. We then use the newly developed theory to model flexoelectric soft robotic grippers subjected to a constraint. A numerical approach has been proposed to evaluate the required gripping force for grasping an object using a constrained flexoelectric gripper. We also develop nonlinear closed-form solutions under open- and closed-circuit conditions that show an excellent agreement with our numerical solutions. We finally highlight the capabilities of flexoelectric grippers at different values of flexoelectric coefficients and identify the gripping and non-gripping zones. On the one hand, the electric fields generated in the flexoelectric gripper under open-circuit conditions provide optimized force-feedback control to grip and prevent excessive localized damage to the object. On the other hand, the voltages directly provide optimized force-feedback control under closed-circuit conditions to grip and to prevent localized damage. In general, the overall gripping mechanism has been enhanced when the flexoelectric gripper is considered as intrinsically curved.
This article has been accepted for publication in IJSS. You can read the paper here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/402930582_FlexoGrip_A_soft_die…