Reticular Origami Soft Robotic Gripper for Shape-Adaptive and Bistable Rapid Grasping

The top–down approach in designing and fabricating origami robots could achieve far more complicated functions with compliant and elegant designs than traditional robots. This study presents the design, fabrication, and testing of a reticular origami soft robotic gripper that could adapt to the shape of the grasping subject and grasp the subject within 80 ms from the trigger instance. A sensing mechanism consisting of the resistive pressure sensor array and flexible elongation sensor is designed to validate further the shape-adaptive grasping capability and model the rough shape and size of the subject. The grasping test on various objects with different shapes, surface textures, sizes, and living animals further validates the excellent grasping capabilities of the gripper. The gripper could be either actively triggered by actuation or passively triggered by a minimum of 0.0014 J disturbance energy. Such features make it particularly suitable for applications such as capturing underwater creatures and illegal drone control.