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Soft grippers have safer and more adaptable human–machine and environment–machine interactions than rigid grippers. However, most soft grippers with single gripping postures have a limited gripping range. Therefore, this paper aims to design a soft gripper with variable gripping posture to enhance the gripping adaptability.

This paper proposes a novel soft gripper consisting of a conversion mechanism and four spring-reinforced soft pneumatic actuators (SSPAs) as soft fingers. By adjusting the conversion mechanism, four gripping postures can be achieved to grip objects of different shapes, sizes and weights. Furthermore, a quasi-static model is established to predict the bending deformation of the finger. Finally, the bending angle of the finger is measured to validate the accuracy of the quasi-static model. The gripping force and gripping adaptability are tested to explore the gripping performance of the gripper.

Through experiments, the results have shown that the quasi-static model can accurately predict the deformation of the finger; the gripper has the most significant gripping force under the parallel posture, and the gripping adaptability of the gripper is highly enhanced by converting the four gripping postures.

By increasing the gripping posture, a novel soft gripper with enhanced gripping adaptability is proposed to enlarge the gripping range of the soft gripper with a single posture. Furthermore, a quasi-static model is established to analyze the deformation of SSPA.

Considering the response lag and viscous slip oscillation of the system caused by cylinder piston friction during automatic polishing of aero-engine blades by a robotic pneumatic end-effector, the purpose of this study is to propose a constant force control method with adaptive friction compensation.

First, the mathematical model of the pneumatic end-effector is established based on the continuous LuGre model, and the static parameters of the LuGre model are identified to verify the necessity of friction compensation. Second, aiming at the problems of difficult identification of dynamic parameters and unmeasurable internal states in the LuGre model, the parameter adaptive law and friction state observer are designed to estimate these parameters online. Finally, an adaptive friction compensation backstepping controller is designed to improve the response speed and polishing force control accuracy of the system.

Simulation and experimental results show that, compared with proportion integration differentiation, extended state observer-based active disturbance rejection controller and integral sliding mode controller, the proposed method can quickly and effectively suppress the polishing force fluctuation caused by nonlinear friction and significantly improve the blade quality.

The pneumatic force control method combining backstepping control with the friction adaptive compensation based on LuGre friction model is studied, which effectively suppresses the fluctuation of normal polishing force.