A Hybrid Gripper with Passive Jamming Fingers and Cable-Driven Joints for Enhanced Payload Capacity and Misalignment Tolerance

Inspired by the human hand, this work presents a hybrid rigid–soft gripper that achieves passive adaptability through a self-resetting granular jamming pouch integrated onto a 3-DOF cable-driven rigid skeleton. Seven fingertip configurations (rigid tip, different jamming particles, and TPU-only) were evaluated across five object geometries. The jamming pouch configurations showed a clear advantage over rigid fingertips and a modest improvement over TPU-only fingertips when grasping flat or smoothly curved surfaces, while demonstrating substantially superior performance for objects with sharp protrusions, lips, undercuts, or deformable edges, where enhanced conformability and geometric interlocking markedly improved payload capacity and lateral offset tolerance. The passive self-reset mechanism remained reliable over 1000 cycles. These results demonstrate that the hybrid design effectively combines the advantages of rigid and soft grippers, achieving superior overall grasping performance while balancing adaptability and payload without pneumatic actuation, with strong potential for applications in logistics, food handling, and mobile robotics.