Soft Gripper

A gripper with soft fingers, often silicone, that wraps around an object by deforming instead of gripping rigidly.

A soft gripper's fingers are made from elastic materials such as silicone or rubber. Most are pneumatically actuated: pumping air into or out of internal chambers makes the fingers curl; some designs instead pull the fingers with tendons or small motors. Because the fingers are themselves soft, they deform to match an object's surface on contact, so the gripper doesn't need to know the object's exact shape or position in advance, and it's unlikely to crush anything fragile. That makes soft grippers the most common real-world form of soft robotics, widely used to pick and sort food, fruit, and other fresh produce. The downsides are limited grip force and positioning accuracy, and the material ages with use. Like fin-ray grippers and granular jamming grippers, soft grippers rely on passive structural compliance to adapt to what they touch, rather than active sensing and control.

ExampleFood-packing lines use pneumatic soft grippers to pick up fragile items like eggs and strawberries.

Also called

Flexible Gripper, Soft Robotic Hand

Related

Gripper · Soft Robot · Pneumatic Actuation · Fin Ray Gripper · Granular Jamming Gripper (Universal Gripper) · Compliance

Sources

Soft robotics - Wikipedia