Design and Optimization of a One-Shot 3D-Printed Soft Gripper for Agricultural and Food Product Handling

This research introduces a one-shot 3D-printed soft gripper for handling agricultural and food products. Fabricated in a single FDM printing process, the design requires no assembly, reducing post-processing time and keeping costs low. The mechanism is supported by protruding tips and constraining features, enables reliable grasping of diverse objects. A custom user-friendly optimization application was developed to streamline the optimization workflow. Using the Bayesian Optimization algorithm and real-world performance data, it refines key geometric and actuation parameters without relying on complex simulations. The optimized design achieved a 91.85% grasp success rate, improving performance by 18.89% within ten iterations.