The Xeno-Tongue Gripper: Granular Jamming Suction Cup with Bellow-Driven Self-Morphing

Soft grippers have demonstrated significant improvements in grasping in unstructured environments and grasping delicate objects. However, there are limitations preventing more widespread real-world use, from low holding force, high control complexity in diverse object sets, and challenges picking in clutter and more. We present a soft adaptive suction cup design-featuring a morphing granular jamming cup augmented by a suction-based ‘Xeno-Tongue’-which can pick and handle diverse objects under a variety of environmental constraints, or lack of. The gripper combines soft suction with an in-built pulling mechanism, i.e., the tongue provides active pulling for automatic suction cup shape adaptation to objects independent of the surrounding environment. We characterise and predict the grasping performance on a series of benchmarking surfaces. Additionally, grasping real-world objects, in clutter and a simulated harvesting environment, using an unmodified control strategy demonstrates adaptability and agility for rapid application in agriculture and other industries.