Optimization of a Vacuum-driven Origami Soft Robotic Gripper with a Combined Miura-ori Waterbomb Skeleton

Soft robotic grippers achieve robust and adaptive grasping performances through their flexibility.Creating substantial gripping strength across various object shapes and levels of fragility is a prominent challenge.This paper reports on experiments that tested whether a vacuum-driven origami soft robotic gripper with a novel combined Miura-ori Waterbomb skeleton pattern would increase gripping strength compared to a Waterbomb pattern.When gripping a sphere, a shape with a smooth and curved surface, and gripping a frustum, a shape with a wider bottom than top that is more difficult to grasp, across multiple pressures, the Miura-ori Waterbomb pattern demonstrated a significant increase in maximum gripping force.For both object shapes and all pressures, the Miura-ori Waterbomb pattern achieved maximum gripping strength at earlier extensions, demonstrating greater placement tolerance.These findings show that the soft gripper designed utilizing a combined Miura-ori Waterbomb skeleton pattern driven by negative pneumatic pressure (vacuum) produced significant increases in gripping strength and adaptability.This novel gripper design demonstrates potential across many applications in which gentle but strong grasping across varied object shapes is required.