Sea anemone inspires adaptable robotic gripper 

The doughnut-shaped gripper captures and releases objects by crimping its thermoplastic skin, controlled by liquid pressure in the ring. By adjusting factors such as the length of the skin and the direction in which it rolls, the researchers were able to control whether objects were grabbed, fully engulfed, or released. The team, made up of scientists from China’s Tsinghua University and Southwest University of Science and Technology, said the robotic torus is highly adaptable and can be used to exert different types of grip across a wide range of objects. 

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"We found that sea anemones can capture sea creatures with different shapes and sizes, so we decided to investigate the mechanism of the predation strategy, and we believed that the study would be helpful to the design of adaptive soft graspers," said Weifeng Yuan, author of the study, which appears in Applied Physics Letters.