📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
Post-harvest losses in fragile agricultural produce including tomatoes, mangoes, and leafy vegetables account for between 20 and 45 percent of production value in Nigerian agriculture, with mechanical damage during handling being a principal loss driver. Conventional rigid robotic grippers cause bruising and surface damage in soft produce, limiting their applicability in post-harvest automation. This study presents the development and experimental validation of a pneumatically actuated soft robotic gripper with variable stiffness properties, designed for handling fragile agricultural produce across a range of firmness and morphological characteristics. The gripper is fabricated using silicone elastomer casting with embedded fibre reinforcement networks that produce controlled bending deformation under pneumatic inflation. Finite element analysis is used to optimize the fibre winding angle and elastomer shore hardness for the target gripping force range of 0 to 8 Newtons. Variable stiffness is achieved through a jamming mechanism using granular particle-filled chambers surrounding each finger, controlled by a vacuum actuator. The gripper is mounted on a UR3e robotic arm and evaluated across a battery of gripping trials involving 200 tomatoes of varying ripeness, 150 mangoes, and 100 sweet pepper specimens. Damage rate was 2.4 percent across all trials, compared to 18.7 percent for a rigid parallel gripper baseline tested on the same produce population. Gripping success rate across the produce range was 96.1 percent. The study contributes a validated soft gripper design and fabrication procedure applicable to Nigerian post-harvest mechanization development programmes. Keywords: soft robotics, gripper, agricultural automation, post-harvest, variable stiffness
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