Soft grippers lack the precision and payload capacity required for industrial adoption, whereas most developed hybrid grippers are not suitable for harsh and versatile industrial environments, and designing a gripper capable of realizing the optimal handling of both soft and rigid objects remains a challenge. This work presents significant enhancements to our universal gripper with rigid mechanics and self‐adaptable fingers for powertrain automation and assembly applications. The redesigned self‐adaptable fingers, validated through finite element analysis and experimental testing, achieved an improvement in the wrapping capability while increasing the maximum retention force. The transformation from a four‐bar to six‐bar linkage mechanism with an integrated compliant pad eliminated rigid link interference issues, enabling articulation angles up to δ 1 = −22° and δ 2 = −15° while maintaining 95.3% force transmission efficiency. These enhancements expanded the operational capacity from 3 to 7.5 kg maximum payload and increased the grasping diameter by 23% to 270 mm. Comprehensive validation through pull‐out tests and robotic grasping experiments with objects ranging from 247 to 7500 g demonstrated the performance of the enhanced industrial gripper with 100% success rate. The enhanced gripper combines soft robotic adaptability with industrial reliability through passive compliance, enabling flexible manufacturing.
Khalid et al. (Wed,) studied this question.