Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Grasping and manipulation are fundamental ways for many creatures to interact with their environments. For example, human hands and bird feet are composed of rigid frames and soft joints.
Compared with human hands, some plants like Drosera do not have rigid frames, so they can bend at arbitrary points of the body to capture their prey. Furthermore, many muscular hydrostat animals and plant tendrils can implement more complex twisting motions in 3D space.
An exhaustive and updated analysis of each type of gripper is provided. For each type of gripper, material properties, device architectures, and manipulation strategies are systematically explored and analyzed. For creatures, including both animals and plants, grasping and manipulation are essential ways to interact with their environments. For example, although octopus tentacles are flexible enough to implement complex twisting movements, octopuses have evolved suckers on their tentacles to ensure the stability of grasping.
Unlike the grippers of creatures, traditional robotic grippers, the earliest imitations of biological end effectors, are mainly composed of rigid frames and joints. They are widely applied in industrial robots, aeronautics, and humanoid robots, such as the famous ASIMO series. Actuators can accurately transfer power to manipulate components via traditional transmission mechanisms, such as gear and link transmission mechanisms.
However, the high structural stiffness also limits their ability to deform elastically and adapt to target objects. More importantly, it is unsafe for humans to interact with robotic grippers with high structural stiffness; for instance, workers are not allowed to enter into the work area of robotic arms to avoid danger. To overcome the defects and disadvantages inherent in traditional rigid grippers, increasingly more researchers have begun to apply soft robotic technologies in the field of grippers and manipulators.
