Soft bioinspired pneumatic actuator for adaptive grasping based on direct ink writing method

Soft robots have attractive advantages of being highly flexible and adaptive to complex environment. The increasing demand for grasping diverse objects in unstructured human-machine and environment-machine interactions has attracted enormous attentions. In this study, we present a soft bioinspired pneumatic actuator (SBPA) based on direct ink writing method with advantages of simple, rapid, low-cost, high efficiency. SBPA has three humanoid phalanges and is capable of grasping a variety of objects with different weights, sizes, textures, and stiffnesses robustly. The proposed SBPA is compared and optimized through the simulation and the experimental investigations for predicting the deformation characteristics. The effects of bending characteristics, envelope range and blocking force for SBPA are evaluated and demonstrate the potential application as soft robotics. SBPA-based gripper is developed to achieve the conformal grasping performance in narrow space and complex environment. The customized scheme based on additive manufacturing method has potential to accelerate individual design cycle of soft humanoid actuators, and shows promising potential in practical applications, such as product packaging, object manipulation, human-machine interaction and human healthcare devices.