Bioinspired Bidirectional Stiffening Soft Actuators Enable Versatile and Robust Grasping

The bending stiffness modulation mechanism for soft grippers has gained considerable attention to improve grasping versatility, capacity, and stability. However, lateral stability is usually ignored or hard to achieve at the same time with good bending stiffness modulation performance. Therefore, this article presents a bioinspired bidirectional stiffening soft actuator (BISA), enabling compliant and stable performance. BISA combines the air tendon actuation (ATA) and a bone-like structure (BLS). The ATA is the main actuation of the BISA, and the bending stiffness can be modulated with a maximum stiffness of about 0.7 N/mm and a maximum magnification of three times when the bending angle is 45°. Inspired by the morphological structure of the phalanx, the lateral stiffness can be modulated by changing the pulling force of the BLS. The actuator with BLSs can improve the lateral stiffness by about 3.9 times compared to the one without BLSs. The maximum lateral stiffness can reach 0.46 N/mm. And the lateral stiffness can be modulated by decoupling about 1.3 times (e.g., from 0.35 to 0.46 N/mm when the bending angle is 45°). The test results show that the influence of the rigid structures on bending is small with about 1.5 mm maximum position errors of the distal point of the actuator in different pulling forces. The advantages brought by the proposed method enable versatile four-finger grasping. The performance of this gripper is characterized and demonstrated on multiscale, multiweight, and multimodal grasping tasks.