Design and finite element analysis of soft robotic grippers for fresh food in smart restaurants

Abstract

With the development of intelligent catering and automated food sorting, traditional rigid grippers suffer from insufficient flexibility, high contact stress, and poor adaptability when grasping fragile foods such as fruits and eggs. This paper designs a three-finger soft mechanical gripper for fresh-food sorting in intelligent restaurants and constructs an end-effector system with a top-mounted structure. The gripper adopts a symmetrical three-finger layout, with the soft fingers made of TPU elastic material and a corrugated structure to improve bending capacity and enveloping gripping effect. This paper uses CAD to model the gripper and support structure and analyzes the dimensions, materials, and mass of key components. Subsequently, the finite element method is used to study the stress distribution and deformation of the top structure and soft fingers. The results show that the structure has a certain load-bearing capacity, and the soft fingers exhibit small deformation and low stress levels when contacting eggs, reducing the risk of damage to fragile foods. This study verifies the feasibility of the three-finger soft gripper design and can provide a reference for subsequent structural optimization, prototype manufacturing, and practical application.