Fabrication of Origami Soft Gripper Using On-Fabric 3D Printing

Abstract

In this work, we have presented a soft encapsulating gripper for gentle grasps. This was enabled by a series of soft origami patterns, such as the Yoshimura pattern, which was directly printed on fabric. The proposed gripper features a deformable body that enables safe interaction with its surroundings, gentle grasps of delicate and fragile objects, and encapsulated structures allowing for noninvasive enclosing. The gripper was fabricated by a direct 3D printing of soft materials on fabric. This allowed for the stiffness adjustment of gripper components and a simple fabrication process. We evaluated the grasping performance of the proposed gripper with several delicate and ultra-gentle objects. It was concluded that the proposed gripper could manipulate delicate objects from fruits to silicone jellyfishes and, therefore, have considerable potential for use as improved soft encapsulating grippers in agriculture and engineering fields.