Lightweight and Powerful Vacuum-Driven Gripper With Bioinspired Elastic Spine

Vacuum-driven soft grippers are drawing increasing attention in robotics due to their flexibility and adaptability, similar to conventional soft grippers driven by positive pressure. Although better durability and failure safety have been demonstrated, current designs still suffer from high dead weight and limited load-carrying capabilities. In this letter, we present a vacuum-driven gripper consisting of unstretchable fabric chambers and bioinspired elastic spines, capable of compliant, rapid, and powerful grasping. The proposed gripper performs the characteristics of lightweight, high repeatability, and good fatigue resistance. It can exert a maximum grasping force of over 50 N and securely grasp objects of various sizes and shapes, including fast-moving objects. A kinematic model and a quasi-static model are further developed to precisely control the bending angle of the finger, enabling free switching between compliant grasping and squeezing of objects for various application requirements. The proposed design method enriches the field of soft grippers with a simple and replicable approach for achieving safe but high-performance grasping.