Finger-palm synergistic soft gripper for dynamic capture via energy harvesting and dissipation

Abstract

Robotic grippers, inspired by human hands, show an extraordinary ability to manipulate objects of various shapes, sizes, or materials. However, capturing objects with varying kinetic energy remains challenging, regardless of the classical rigid-bodied or frontier soft-bodied grippers. Here, we demonstrate a rapid energy harvesting and dissipation mechanism for the soft grippers leveraging the finger-palm synergy. Theoretically and experimentally, this mechanism enables a soft gripper to reliably capture high-speed targets by dissipating and harvesting almost all the target’s kinetic energy within 30 milliseconds. The energy harvesting and dissipating capability are adjustable and can be enhanced by inflating pressure. Additionally, the harvested energy is autonomously transferred into fingers to enhance their grasping force and reduce the response time. To highlight, the grippers we developed are integrated into a six-rotor drone and successfully capture flying objects in an outdoor experiment. These results significantly advance robotics development in achieving dynamic capture of dynamic targets.