Leaf-like Origami with Bistability for Self-Adaptive Grasping Motions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a leaf-like origami structure with bistability that autonomously adapts its grasping motions without external power, inspired by natural biological systems, enabling versatile and self-adaptive robotic grasping.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel bistable origami design capable of autonomous, tunable grasping motions, including uniform and non-uniform configurations, inspired by biological mechanisms.

Findings

Demonstrated self-adaptive grasping without external power.

Showcased various non-uniform grasping configurations.

Validated autonomous grasping through physical experiments.

Abstract

The leaf-like origami structure was inspired by geometric patterns found in nature, exhibiting unique transitions between open and closed shapes. With a bistable energy landscape, leaf-like origami is able to replicate the autonomous grasping of objects observed in biological systems like the Venus flytrap. We show uniform grasping motions of the leaf-like origami, as well as various non-uniform grasping motions which arise from its multi-transformable nature. Grasping motions can be triggered with high tunability due to the structure's bistable energy landscape. We demonstrate the self-adaptive grasping motion by dropping a target object onto our paper prototype, which does not require an external power source to retain the capture of the object. We also explore the non-uniform grasping motions of the leaf-like structure by selectively controlling the creases, which reveals various unique grasping configurations that can be exploited for versatile, autonomous, and self-adaptive robotic operations.