Reconfigurable Soft Gripper Based on Eversion and Electroadhesion for Cluttered Environments

Robotic grasping in cluttered and real-world human environments is a challenging task. It requires unique kinematic capabilities to deal with spatial constraints as well as compliance and softness to offer collision safety and safe manipulation of sensitive objects. To address this challenge, we propose a novel robotic gripper with two steerable fingers whose lengths can be adjusted by way of a soft eversion mechanism. This enables the gripper to work in confined spaces while interacting safely with the environment. We also developed a new Electroadhesion (EA) pad design with a multilayer structure and a single insulating layer that can be safely integrated with the evertable fingers avoiding short-circuiting or dielectric breakdown to enhance the gripper payload. The resulting gripper can retrieve an object in a confined space and partially occluded by a barrier. It exhibits remarkable versatility in terms of object sizes, grasping objects with varying widths at least ranging from 70 mm to 600 mm. These results provide a promising avenue for new robotic applications in real-world environments.