Flexible Grippers Are Transforming Farming Livelihoods: Smart Harvesting in Argriculture 4.0

Gone are the days when soft robotic grippers were just a laboratory curiosity. Thanks to the development and adoption of technologies, today, these bio-inspired smart gadgets are innovating the agricultural industry and performing as an attractive option for warehouses, food distributors, and factories with a high mix of products.

In recent years, the word "Biomimetics" has been breaking into the real world, including the farming industries. These biomimetic innovations have modernized the picking process, making fruit and vegetable picking a low-cost and high-efficiency task, which has faced several challenges in the traditional approaches.

Why Smart Harvesting Become A Must in Agriculture 4.0？

Among the main tasks in the agricultural process, those involving the manipulation of fruits and vegetables are still one of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks, resulting in low efficiency and limited competitiveness. Unfortunately, this situation is exacerbated by the shortage of labor due to seasonal workers' inability to travel between regions, resulting in the accumulation of fresh products and impressive food losses.

Luckily, with the emergence of soft robotic grippers, these problems can be solved easily with smart harvesting. Recent biomimetic innovations in the farming industry offer solutions to practical problems by analyzing biological systems and transferring their principles into machine applications. In order to improve the flexibility of the product, the flexible gripper is improved based on the principle of bionics, imitating the action of octopus tentacles winding around the grasped object, and grasping the object in a winding way. 

Today's Soft robotic grippers are able to continuously change their shape in accordance with different types of fruits and vegetables without requiring complex mechanisms. The main advantage of this innovation is that manufacturers can now reduce the risk of causing a surface bruise, rupture, or any crushing damage to vulnerable products such as cherries, kiwifruits, grapefruits, and so many others. Compared to the manual harvesting approach, this greater adaptability will significantly provide lower cost and simpler structure to control algorithm than traditional hard-end actuators.

Let SmartMore's Flexible Grippers to Innovate Your Production Lines

Under the great demand for smart harvesting, SmartMore is now offering one of the most attractive solutions for your business. Our flexible grippers are designed to disrupt the traditional grabbing approach to boost business efficiency while maintaining safe interaction with people and the environment. Our flexible grippers are made of flexible materials to ensure safe and non-destructive grasping and provide high adaptability to different application scenarios.

Our flexible grippers are also easy to use and flexible to adapt to any mechanical system. The fingertips of our flexible grippers are opened under positive pressure and clamped in the vacuum state. It is recommended to use together with the soft-touch air driver. The distance between fingertips when clamping can be easily adjusted by operating air pressure regulation. We offer flexible grippers with different numbers of fingers for customers to choose from based on their system needs, our product now includes three types of standard flexible gripper series: two fingers, three fingers, and four fingers. 

Wonder what you can get from our flexible grippers? Check the below:

• Safe working environment: Our soft robotic grippers are composed of flexible materials. We are committed to providing safe application scenarios that will not cause any pain even if a human hand is accidentally clamped. With its intrinsic safety, our products have been proven to be suitable for human-machine interaction and can be widely used in scientific research and service. 

• Reliable grabbing process: Our flexible grippers have an elastic structure, which can offset excess external force. This guarantee that the whole grasping process will not cause any damage to the object. Thus, our product is highly suitable for non-destructive grasping of fruit, glass, ceramics, die-casting objects of powder, and flexible production of multi-specification products in one production line. 

• High adaptability: Our grippers can adapt to the contour of the object. One single gripper can grasp workpieces of different shapes and sizes. Thus, they are appropriate for grabbing special-shaped objects and flexible production of multi-specification products in one production line. 

• Cost-efficiency and time-saving solution: With our flexible grippers, you no longer need to customize the shape of the claw according to the different shapes of the workpieces. Further, no quick change is required when grabbing objects of multiple specifications. Our grippers can be used immediately upon arrival to save time and labor and provide the most cost-efficient solution to boost the efficiency of your production system. 

Today, in addition to the farming field, flexible grippers are widely used in a great variety of industries such as automobile, electronics and mechanical, food, medical, logistics, and so on. With flexible grippers, the assembly, sorting, and handling process has been significantly innovated. Through simple and convenient installation, any system can achieve higher security and versatility in the future. Interested in learning more about our flexible grippers? Click here to explore more!