The new soft gripper design features self-entanglement and mechanical interlocking for efficient grasping, suggesting practical applications in manufacturing and agriculture.
Self‐adaptive, easy‐to‐control, and low‐cost gripper devices are indispensable in manufacturing and agriculture. However, the existing soft grippers cannot provide high response speed and firm grasping. Inspired by the natural, active entanglement behaviors of animals and plants, a rapid, cilia‐like soft gripper design is proposed for grasping various objects via envelopes formed by the self‐entanglement of multiple hollowed silicone tubes. The basic entanglement unit comprises a hollow, soft silicone tube with an actuation wire inside, which leads to compression and entanglement by fixing the front of the tube and drawing the actuation wire. Using multiple entanglement units enables sufficient mechanical interlocking between deformed tubes and grasped objects, avoiding the reliance on contact force control. Experimental results demonstrate that the developed soft gripper, with a cost lower than one dollar, can complete adaptive grasping within 1 s. The grasping success rate can reach 100% in grasping common irregular‐shaped daily objects within the effective grasping range of the entanglement units. The design paves the way for harnessing the potential of embodied intelligence in soft robots, enabling fast and universal grasping.
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Xu et al. (2025) studied this question.
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