Double-layered electrohydraulic actuator for bi-directional bending motion of soft gripper

There are significant demands to develop soft grippers capable of performing sophisticated tasks such as grasping various types of unstructured objects. To facilitate the development of soft grippers, new actuators based on soft materials and structures that can increase their adaptability to objects are needed. In this study, we propose a new soft electrohydraulic actuator and a robotic gripper. The proposed actuator creates bi-directional bending motion by that two modules are constrained to each other. Also, the gripper based on the soft actuators realizes a wide operating range depending on the combination of the actuator’s bending direction. The results demonstrate the grasping ability to grab deformable and delicate objects of various shapes. These bi-directional soft actuators provide new design ideas for mobile robots and wearable devices as well as soft grippers.