Origami Chomper-Based Flexible Gripper with Superior Gripping Performances

Flexible grippers with superior gripping capabilities are essential for carrying objects. Herein, an origami chomper-based flexible gripper is designed using a combination of the origami technique and a newly developed nonlinear topology optimization method. This novel origami chomper-based flexible gripper exhibits superior gripping performance, as revealed by a series of experiments, including gripping range capability under an identical input load, maximum gripping ratio, gripping adaptability, and achieving richer gripping characteristics by size scaling. The origami chomper-based flexible gripper can handle a wide range of object irregularities in textures and uneven shapes and can enable effective gripping of objects across scales from millimeters to centimeters to decimeters through size scaling. This study paves the way for innovative high-performance designs of flexible grippers.