Overview
Conventional rigid grippers struggle with soft, fragile, or flat objects. This work proposes a soft gripper that combines soft bellow actuators with origami-inspired soft twisting actuators (Actuator II OSPAs), a slider, and a supporting frame. Inflating the actuators opens the gripper; deflating them makes the two actuators shrink and rotate in opposite directions, closing the gripper while generating an in-plane rolling motion at the contact.
That rotation is the key capability: it lets the gripper clamp and lift at the same moment, which is advantageous for small fragile items and flat flexible objects that most soft grippers cannot pick up.
Key results
- Gently grasped a cherry tomato (~30 mm diameter) using the rotation motion of the OSPAs.
- Handled objects up to 50 mm in diameter and over 500 g in weight.
- Picked up a piece of paper and plastic film through friction and in-plane motion, where most previous soft grippers were inadequate.
- Demonstrated a stable lifting mode that transports a strawberry from the lower to the upper contact surface during grasping, reducing prolonged gripping stress on delicate objects.
Videos
Three local supplementary videos show adaptive grasping, in-hand manipulation, and impact resistance.