A Vacuum-Powered Soft Mesh Gripper for Compliant and Effective Grasping

Performing adaptive grasping tasks with unknown shapes is challenging for robotic grippers. The emergence of soft robotics brings a new perspective to address this challenge, since soft robots have unique merits of lightweight, inherent softness and natural compliance owing to the soft materials and actuation methods. In this paper, inspired by soft mesh structures, we propose a soft robotic gripper based on flexible 3D-printed mesh skeleton. With this new design, the soft gripper can effectively contract and grasp various objects upon vacuum actuation. The 3D-printed stretchable mesh allows the gripper to perfectly match the shapes of target objects in less than 1s. This compliant feature allows the soft gripper to safely handle fragile objects, with the potential to be customized for specific objects and tasks. The developed gripper is expected to be useful for various pick-and-place tasks such as food handling, cosmetic packaging, and fruit picking.