Octopus-Inspired Underwater Soft Robotic Gripper with Crawling and Swimming Capabilities
Mingxin Wu,
Waqar Hussain Afridi,
Jiaxi Wu,
Rahdar Hussain Afridi,
Kaiwei Wang,
Xingwen Zheng,
Chen Wang,
Guangming Xie
Affiliations
Mingxin Wu
State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, Intelligent Biomimetic Design Lab, College of Engineering,
Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Waqar Hussain Afridi
State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, Intelligent Biomimetic Design Lab, College of Engineering,
Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Jiaxi Wu
State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, Intelligent Biomimetic Design Lab, College of Engineering,
Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Rahdar Hussain Afridi
State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, Intelligent Biomimetic Design Lab, College of Engineering,
Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Kaiwei Wang
State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, Intelligent Biomimetic Design Lab, College of Engineering,
Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Xingwen Zheng
State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, Intelligent Biomimetic Design Lab, College of Engineering,
Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Chen Wang
State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, Intelligent Biomimetic Design Lab, College of Engineering,
Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Guangming Xie
State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, Intelligent Biomimetic Design Lab, College of Engineering,
Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Can a robotic gripper only operate when attached to a robotic arm? The application space of the traditional gripper is limited by the robotic arm. Giving robot grippers the ability to move will expand their range of applications. Inspired by rich behavioral repertoire observed in octopus, we implement an integrated multifunctional soft robotic gripper with 6 independently controlled Arms. It can execute 8 different gripping actions for different objects, such as irregular rigid/soft objects, elongated objects with arbitrary orientation, and plane/curved objects with larger sizes than the grippers. Moreover, the soft gripper can realize omnidirectional crawling and swimming by itself. The soft gripper can perform highly integrated tasks of releasing, crawling, swimming, grasping, and retrieving objects in a confined underwater environment. Experimental results demonstrate that the integrated capabilities of multimodal adaptive grasping and omnidirectional motions enable dexterous manipulations that traditional robotic arms cannot achieve. The soft gripper may apply to highly integrated and labor-intensive tasks in unstructured underwater environments, including ocean litter collecting, capture fishery, and archeological exploration.
