Designing a Flexible Grasp Tool and Associated Grasping Strategies for Handling Multiple Meat Products in an Industrial Setting

In this paper, we present a suction cup based gripper tool for grasping different cuts of meat. The tool is attached to a 6DOF robot arm in order to test different grasp strategies. The task of grasping pork bellies is difficult since the objects are highly flexible. Due to the deformations, an airtight connection can form between the meat and the object below it. During the lift, this can lead to a vacuum which sometimes causes the grasp to fail. Thus it is important that the tool and the grasp strategy is able to minimize the effects of this vacuum in order to generate a stable grasp. Furthermore, there is a high variation in the meat products and the initial placement of the products. Thus the tool has to be sufficiently flexible to handle the different cases robustly.