Pan Tianle, Zhou Jianshu, Zhang Zihao, Zhang Huayu, Hu Jinfei, An Jiajun, Liu Yunhui, Ma Xin
Multi-scale Medical Robotics Center, Hong Kong, China.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
Soft Robot. 2025 Feb;12(1):145-155. doi: 10.1089/soro.2023.0252. Epub 2024 Oct 2.
Robotic grasping plays a pivotal role in real-world interactions for robots. Existing grippers often limit functionality to a single grasping mode-picking or suction. While picking handles smaller objects and suction adapts to larger ones, integrating these modes breaks scale boundaries, expanding the robot's potential in real applications. This article introduces grasping modes transformable soft gripper capable of achieving amphibious cross-scale objects grasping. Despite its compact and fully scalable design (20 mm in diameter prototype), it morphs into two configurations, gripping objects from 10% (2 mm) to over 1000% (200 mm) of its size, spanning a vast 100-fold range. To enhance its grasping efficacy, we derived theoretical analytical models for the two distinct grasping modes. Subsequently, we present a detailed illustration of the gripper's fabrication process. Experimental validation demonstrates the gripper's success in attaching or detaching everyday items and industrial products, achieving high success rates in both air and underwater scenarios. Amphibious grasping and card manipulation demonstrations underscore the practicality of this transformative soft robotics approach.
机器人抓取在机器人的现实世界交互中起着关键作用。现有的抓取器通常将功能限制在单一的抓取模式——拾取或吸附。虽然拾取适用于较小的物体，吸附适用于较大的物体，但将这些模式集成可以突破尺寸限制，扩大机器人在实际应用中的潜力。本文介绍了一种能够实现两栖跨尺寸物体抓取的可变形软抓取器。尽管其设计紧凑且完全可扩展（直径20毫米的原型），但它可以变形为两种配置，抓取尺寸从其自身尺寸的10%（2毫米）到超过1000%（200毫米）的物体，跨度达100倍之广。为了提高其抓取效率，我们推导了两种不同抓取模式的理论分析模型。随后，我们详细说明了抓取器的制造过程。实验验证表明，该抓取器在抓取或分离日常物品和工业产品方面取得了成功，在空气和水下场景中均实现了高成功率。两栖抓取和卡片操作演示强调了这种变革性软机器人方法的实用性。
