Origami soft gripper brings light touch to heavy loads

Soft robotic grippers are widely used across industry to move everything from fruit to delicate glassware, but the strength with which they can grasp objects is usually limited. Employing a ‘magic ball’ origami design, the MIT team created a soft gripper that’s capable of lifting much heavier items.

The magic ball structure features folds that allow it to morph from a spherical shape into a cylindrical form. Using a hemisphere with this origami design, the engineers created skeletons for the gripper, which were covered with a variety of airtight flexible materials. When vacuum pressure is applied, the hemisphere compacts into a cylinder, closing tightly around target objects. The research is published on MIT’s website and will be presented at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in May.

“Soft robotics has yielded numerous examples of soft grippers that utilise compliance to achieve impressive grasping performances with great simplicity, adaptability, and robustness,” according to the paper’s abstract. “Designing soft grippers with substantial grasping strength while remaining compliant and gentle is one of the most important challenges in this field.