The Quad-Spatula Gripper: A Novel Soft-Rigid Gripper for Food Handling

Robotic food handling is a complicated task to perform when the ingredients that are handled are delicate in nature. It is important to design end-effectors that can be versatile and reliable while limiting damage on the manipulated items. We present in this paper a novel soft-rigid gripper that exploits the combination of specialised fingertips with a passively compliant structure. The proposed device can gently grasp objects of different shape by scraping with four spatula-shaped components that interlock and form a stable plate enclosed by fingers. This solution allows both the forces applied directly onto an object during handling and the precision needed to identify object position for grasp planning to be reduced, while increasing the grasping success rate compared to a classical gripper. We have tested a prototype in a real experimental setup using real ingredients. The encouraging results suggest that this approach to ingredient manipulation may be especially useful when delicate objects need to be handled in the context of an automated food production line.