Soft Grippers Using Micro‐fibrillar Adhesives for Transfer Printing

Abstract

The adhesive characteristics of fibrillar adhesives on a soft deformable membrane are reported. A soft gripper with an inflatable membrane covered by elastomer mushroom-shaped microfibers have a superior conformation to non-planar 3D part geometries, enabling the transfer printing of various parts serially or in parallel.

Light‐Driven Soft Robot Mimics Caterpillar Locomotion in Natural Scale

“…In particular, continuous, rather than discrete, deformation allows for adaptation to many situations the robot may encounter. Recently developed soft robots are able to perform various tasks in confined spaces, [3] grip arbitrary-shaped objects [4,5] and jump, mimicking biological behaviors. [6,7] Caterpillar terrestrial locomotion had been thoroughly studied [8,9] and their kinematics, notably their traveling deformation wave locomotion, has been an inspiration for soft robot designs.…”

Versatile Soft Grippers with Intrinsic Electroadhesion Based on Multifunctional Polymer Actuators

“…The electroadhesion force also enables the picking up of flat and deformable objects. The gripper can be controlled only by a single control voltage thanks to the simple, compliant composite structure, similar in overall concept to [15,[19][20][21][22][23][24] . These features lead to a highlyintegrated, multifunctional conformal soft gripper with fast motion (~100 ms to close fingers), high holding force and simplified structure and control, paving a way for sensitive, highly versatile grippers for soft robotics.…”

“…Gecko-inspired adhesion uses van der Waals forces between passively deformed micro fibers and the target surface. However, in this technology, the adhesion mechanism relies upon external mechanical preloading in the normal or shear direction [21,[37][38][39][40][41] , which may cause unpredictable deformation and possible damage when the target object is deformable or fragile. Reversibility of the gecko adhesion is also challenging to achieve with lightweight objects, and the adhesion mechanism works poorly on low surface-energy materials, such as Teflon [42] .…”

Controllable load sharing for soft adhesive interfaces on three-dimensional surfaces

“…However, difficulties arise in dealing with 3D surfaces because the current gecko-inspired synthetic adhesive systems are often supported by a rigid backing, which limits their ability to conform to nonplanar surfaces. In our previous work, we created elastomeric fibrillar adhesives integrated with a soft membrane, which we named as fibrillar adhesives on a membrane (FAM), and fixed the membrane onto a 3D-printed rigid plastic body so that the system could handle various 3D objects (15). Despite demonstrating a significant improvement over an unstructured elastomeric membrane with 10× higher adhesion, the tested FAM could achieve only 2 kPa of adhesion stress, a small fraction of the 55 kPa measured with rigid-backed microfiber arrays (16).…”