- The flexible “fingers” at the tip of an elephant’s trunk have provided the inspiration for a versatile robotic gripper capable of picking up and holding onto a variety of objects both large and small – from an acupuncture needle to a thin metal ruler to a large packaging box.
- Wires driven by a pneumatic cylinder are fed across the center of this soft structure and alter the gripper’s shape when activated, allowing its claws to partly fold in on themselves to pinch and grab objects, while embedded micro-channels create a vacuum seal to increase the gripping force as necessary.
- This essentially means that the gripper can pick up objects of different shapes, sizes and weights – which the KIMM team demonstrated by grabbing a 0.25-mm-diameter needle plus a packing box that was 10 times its size.
Trunk-inspired robot gripper can pinch and grab objects small and large
