Soft Collaborative Gripper for Dressing Assistance

We present the DressGripper, a collaborative gripper designed for safe interactions in wearing operations. The DressGripper accounts for the two main goals that have to be achieved by a robotic system designed for helping people to get dressed: i) to be intrinsically safe and ii) to keep firmly the cloth during the dressing operations. The DressGripper addresses these issues by combining a compliant and safe structure with an additional magnetic actuation at the fingertips. This solution allows a soft interaction with the robot and guarantees the grasping tightness. Preliminary experiments show the DressGripper suitability in robotic dressing assistance scenarios.