Lip-Inspired Passive Jamming Gripper with Teeth Structure

In this paper, we propose a lip-inspired passive jamming gripper by mimicking teeth structures from a dog's oral structure. Animal lips are hydrostatic structures. To mimic the features, which are usually soft but rigid when contacted, we used the passive particle jamming effect. To increase the adaptability of our previous gripper to grasp various shaped objects, we focused on the dogs' oral structure and holding behaviors. Dogs use spaces inside their mouths to hold sticks firmly when moving. The grasping force of the upgraded gripper was improved by generating teeth structures with the mimicked lip structures. Experiments were conducted to demonstrate the grasping ability of the gripper with the teeth structures by comparing it to other types of grippers with cylindrical and cuboid objects of various dimensions. We also showed that the proposed gripper could hold daily kitchen objects better than the previous version gripper by using closing lip-pouches.