Tube-feet Inspired Soft Gripper

Abstract

Soft gripper can grasp various types of objects even deformable objects or complex shapes. In this work, the design of a soft gripper is inspired by a tube foot of a starfish. Tube foot can deform in multiple directions. The proposed gripper has three soft silicone fingers which are driven by pneumatic actuation. Each finger can be curved in 6 directions using a three sided air chamber. This gripper can be controlled by a binary command into four states: home, open, close and twist. The tube feet inspired soft gripper was developed, modelled and tested.