InstaGrasp: An Entirely 3D Printed Adaptive Gripper with TPU Soft Elements and Minimal Assembly Time

Fabricating existing and popular open-source adaptive robotic grippers commonly involves using multiple professional machines, purchasing a wide range of parts, and tedious, time-consuming assembly processes. This poses a significant barrier to entry for some robotics researchers and drives others to opt for expensive commercial alternatives. To provide both parties with an easier and cheaper (under £100) solution, we propose a novel adaptive gripper design where every component (with the exception of actuators and the screws that come packaged with them) can be fabricated on a hobby-grade 3D printer, via a combination of inexpensive and readily available PLA and TPU filaments. This approach means that the gripper's tendons, flexure joints and finger pads are now printed, as a replacement for traditional string-tendons and molded urethane flexures / pads. A push-fit systems results in an assembly time of under 10 minutes. The gripper design is also highly modular and requires only a few minutes to replace any part, leading to extremely user-friendly maintenance and part modifications. An extensive stress test has shown a level of durability more than suitable for research, whilst grasping experiments (with perturbations) using items from the YCB object set has also proven its mechanical adaptability to be highly satisfactory.