A Soft Robotics Approach to Autonomous Warehouse Picking

Nowadays, an increasing research effort is devoted to picking automation. Toward this goal the main challenge is the flexibility: a single robot should be able to pick objects with various shape, size, and physical properties. It was shown that soft robots, thanks to the elasticity included in their structure in design, are adaptable to grasp different objects and robust to interact in unstructured environments. In this paper, we present a soft robotics-based automatic solution for picking that embeds variable stiffness actuators and the Pisa/IIT SoftHand. This robot took part in the Amazon Picking Challenge.