Tentacle Robot Aims to Give Even Irregularly-Shaped Objects a Soft, Safe, Yet Firm Embrace

Researchers from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University, working with the Zuse Institute Berlin, have created a soft robot designed to gently cradle fragile objects — in its all-encompassing tentacles, inspired by jellyfish and curly hairs.

"With this research, we wanted to reimagine how we interact with objects," explains first author Kaitlyn Becker, now an assistant professor at MIT. "By taking advantage of the natural compliance of soft robotics and enhancing it with a compliant structure, we designed a gripper that is greater than the sum of its parts and a grasping strategy that can adapt to a range of complex objects with minimal planning and perception."

The novel robotic gripper combines earlier work on entangled filament topography and soft robotics, resulting in a device that uses a series of thing tentacles to wrap around an object — tangling itself up in a similar way to a jellyfish ensnaring its prey. Each tentacle, a hollow rubber tube, is created with a thin side and a thick side — curling as it's inflated to wrap around the object to be held. To release the object, the tentacles are simply depressurized.

"This new approach to robotic grasping complements existing solutions by replacing simple, traditional grippers that require complex control strategies with extremely compliant, and morphologically complex filaments that can operate with very simple control," claims Robert Wood, engineering and applied sciences professor and co-corresponding author of the paper. "This approach expands the range of what's possible to pick up with robotic grippers."

To demonstrate its capabilities, the team used a prototype to pick up a range of real-world objects — including toys and, in one impressive example, a soft succulent houseplant. Its creators claim the technology could be used for everything from safely grasping soft fruit in agricultural settings to tissue handling in medicine and even, suitably scaled up, irregularly-shaped fragile items in warehouses.

The team's work has been published under open-access terms in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).