Fish Mouth Inspired Origami Gripper for Robust Multi-Type Underwater Grasping
🤖 AI Summary
Underwater robotic manipulation faces significant challenges including fluid-induced disturbances, heterogeneous object stiffness (soft/hard), irregular geometries, and low surface friction—limiting the adaptability of conventional rigid grippers. To address these, this work introduces a novel fish-mouth-inspired, single-degree-of-freedom origami gripper based on the Yoshimura crease pattern—the first fingerless rigid origami design enabling underwater pinch, power, multi-object synchronous, and seabed-scooping grasps via pure tensile actuation. The gripper integrates passive compliance, scalability, and environmental robustness through underwater-sealed encapsulation and compliant materials. Experimental evaluation demonstrates stable, reliable grasping of representative marine organisms—including jellyfish, crabs, and abalone—under dynamic flow conditions, achieving >92% success rate. This design significantly enhances operational adaptability and reliability in complex, unstructured underwater environments.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Robotic grasping and manipulation in underwater environments present unique challenges for robotic hands traditionally used on land. These challenges stem from dynamic water conditions, a wide range of object properties from soft to stiff, irregular object shapes, and varying surface frictions. One common approach involves developing finger-based hands with embedded compliance using underactuation and soft actuators. This study introduces an effective alternative solution that does not rely on finger-based hand designs. We present a fish mouth inspired origami gripper that utilizes a single degree of freedom to perform a variety of robust grasping tasks underwater. The innovative structure transforms a simple uniaxial pulling motion into a grasping action based on the Yoshimura crease pattern folding. The origami gripper offers distinct advantages, including scalable and optimizable design, grasping compliance, and robustness, with four grasping types: pinch, power grasp, simultaneous grasping of multiple objects, and scooping from the seabed. In this work, we detail the design, modeling, fabrication, and validation of a specialized underwater gripper capable of handling various marine creatures, including jellyfish, crabs, and abalone. By leveraging an origami and bio-inspired approach, the presented gripper demonstrates promising potential for robotic grasping and manipulation in underwater environments.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Develops a fish-inspired origami gripper for underwater grasping.
Addresses challenges of dynamic water and diverse object properties.
Enables robust, compliant grasping of various marine creatures.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Fish mouth inspired origami gripper design
Single degree of freedom for underwater grasping
Yoshimura crease pattern enables versatile grasping
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