Self-Closing Suction Grippers for Industrial Grasping via Form-Flexible Design
Huijiang Wang, Holger Kunz, Timon Adler, Fumiya Iida

TL;DR
This paper introduces a novel form-flexible, self-closing suction gripper that passively morphs to adaptively grasp objects of varying sizes in industrial settings, enhancing versatility and grip security.
Contribution
The work presents a hybrid jamming and suction mechanism enabling a self-closing, shape-morphing gripper that adapts passively to object sizes, improving grasping flexibility.
Findings
Successfully grasped objects as small as 54.5% of aperture size
Achieved a maximum load-to-mass ratio of 94.3
Demonstrated secure grasping of various object sizes
Abstract
Shape-morphing robots have shown benefits in industrial grasping. We propose form-flexible grippers for adaptive grasping. The design is based on the hybrid jamming and suction mechanism, which deforms to handle objects that vary significantly in size from the aperture, including both larger and smaller parts. Compared with traditional grippers, the gripper achieves self-closing to form an airtight seal. Under a vacuum, a wide range of grasping is realized through the passive morphing mechanism at the interface that harmonizes pressure and flow rate. This hybrid gripper showcases the capability to securely grasp an egg, as small as 54.5% of its aperture, while achieving a maximum load-to-mass ratio of 94.3.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSoft Robotics and Applications · Robot Manipulation and Learning · Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence
