Performance Comparison of Parallel and 3 Finger Gripper Using Human Hand Grasping Taxonomies

The selection of best gripper for pick and place robot arm, is always a tedious task to choose from various grippers available. Most of the gripper does not comply with pay load capacity of robot arm and also lacks in efficient handling of objects. This paper assists in solving the issue i.e. how to choose an adequate gripper for pick and place operation considering its object handling property. Therefore, performance testing of parallel and 3 finger gripper are done under simulation environment based on human hand grasping taxonomy. Grasping force and number of contact points between gripper and objects are parameters for comparative study. Simulation experiments are conducted by gazebo simulator running under ROS, to pick and place 10 objects. Based on human hand grasping taxonomy simulation experiments are divided into 3 categories such as normal, misaligned and rotation grasping. Points 0 and 1 are awarded to grippers i.e. 1 is for easy grasping and 0 for difficult grasping or no grasping. From experiments, overall grasping score of parallel and 3 finger gripper are 0.8779 and 0.9667 respectively which leads to conclusion that not only grasping of 3 finger gripper is superior as compared to parallel gripper but also it performs very well on 3 grasping taxonomies of human hand and able to handle fragile and deformable objects efficiently. By addressing the objectives of proposed study, researcher can easily select gripper for a particular application and also can develop more capable, adaptable, and cost-effective manipulation systems.