Evaluation of Usability of a 3-DOF Linkage-Driven Robotic Gripper Through Grasping Experiments*

Conventional dexterous grippers are not only heavy and complex but also task dependent. As a result, they cannot provide power, intermediate and precision grasping together. We propose usability evaluation of a novel gripper mechanism which can provide 1-Degree of Freedom (DOF) parallel grasping and 2-DOF independent pinching by using a closed chain architecture. The usability of our design and one commercial product has been evaluated based on various grasping tasks: adaptive grasping, parallel pinching grasping, independent pinching grasping and contact grasping. The success rate has been evaluated to validate the excellent usability of the proposed 3-DOF gripper.