Grasping with kirigami shells

Yang, Yi; Vella, Katherine; Holmes, Douglas P.

doi:10.1126/scirobotics.abd6426

Cited by 114 publications

(77 citation statements)

References 57 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…A simple, rapid, and economical soft gripper is highly required in biomedical robotics and wildlife-conservation devices. However, for the existing soft grippers realized by pneumatic 44 – 46 , hydraulic 47 , and magnetic actuation 48 , and responsive materials 17 using pinching 44 , 45 , 48 , enclosing 47 , and suction 49 , it is challenging to balance the response time, manufacturing cost, simplicity of designs, and robustness in noninvasive grasping missions. Here, utilizing the dynamically programmable shape morphing, we present a universal, flexible yet robust kirigami hand, which can encapsulate gelatinous and delicate organisms nondestructively in unstructured environments.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Boundary curvature guided programmable shape-morphing kirigami sheets

Hong

Chi

et al. 2022

Nat Commun

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Kirigami, a traditional paper cutting art, offers a promising strategy for 2D-to-3D shape morphing through cut-guided deformation. Existing kirigami designs for target 3D curved shapes rely on intricate cut patterns in thin sheets, making the inverse design challenging. Motivated by the Gauss-Bonnet theorem that correlates the geodesic curvature along the boundary with the Gaussian curvature, here, we exploit programming the curvature of cut boundaries rather than the complex cut patterns in kirigami sheets for target 3D curved morphologies through both forward and inverse designs. The strategy largely simplifies the inverse design. Leveraging this strategy, we demonstrate its potential applications as a universal and nondestructive gripper for delicate objects, including live fish, raw egg yolk, and a human hair, as well as dynamically conformable heaters for human knees. This study opens a new avenue to encode boundary curvatures for shape-programing materials with potential applications in soft robotics and wearable devices.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Boundary curvature guided programmable shape-morphing kirigami sheets

Hong

Chi

et al. 2022

Nat Commun

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Also, the versatility and enhanced conformability of soft robotic grippers are achieved using various mechanical designs and bioinspired structures and such as kirigami shells (Yang et al, 2021), origami structures (Li et al, 2019), cellular structures (Kaur and Kim, 2019), bioinspired spiral springs (Zolfagharian et al, 2021), bionic torus (Zang et al, 2020), torus inspired mechanism (Sui et al, 2020), suction cups with elastomer films (Koivikko et al, 2021), cylindrical accordion structures with gecko-like skins (Hao et al, 2021), compliant mechanisms and fingers (Chen et al, 2018;Hussain et al, 2020), reconfigurable fingers (Pagoli et al, 2021), monolithic underactuated fingers (Mutlu et al, 2016), and a combination of 3D printed suction cups and complaint soft fingers (Tawk et al, 2019b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A 3D Printed Modular Soft Gripper Integrated With Metamaterials for Conformal Grasping

Tawk

Mutlu²,

Alıcı

2022

Front. Robot. AI

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A single universal robotic gripper with the capacity to fulfill a wide variety of gripping and grasping tasks has always been desirable. A three-dimensional (3D) printed modular soft gripper with highly conformal soft fingers that are composed of positive pressure soft pneumatic actuators along with a mechanical metamaterial was developed. The fingers of the soft gripper along with the mechanical metamaterial, which integrates a soft auxetic structure and compliant ribs, was 3D printed in a single step, without requiring support material and postprocessing, using a low-cost and open-source fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printer that employs a commercially available thermoplastic poly (urethane) (TPU). The soft fingers of the gripper were optimized using finite element modeling (FEM). The FE simulations accurately predicted the behavior and performance of the fingers in terms of deformation and tip force. Also, FEM was used to predict the contact behavior of the mechanical metamaterial to prove that it highly decreases the contact pressure by increasing the contact area between the soft fingers and the grasped objects and thus proving its effectiveness in enhancing the grasping performance of the gripper. The contact pressure can be decreased by up to 8.5 times with the implementation of the mechanical metamaterial. The configuration of the highly conformal gripper can be easily modulated by changing the number of fingers attached to its base to tailor it for specific manipulation tasks. Two-dimensional (2D) and 3D grasping experiments were conducted to assess the grasping performance of the soft modular gripper and to prove that the inclusion of the metamaterial increases its conformability and reduces the out-of-plane deformations of the soft monolithic fingers upon grasping different objects and consequently, resulting in the gripper in three different configurations including two, three and four-finger configurations successfully grasping a wide variety of objects.

show abstract

“…Meanwhile, kirigami-cut sheets can exhibit nonlinear properties such as super-stretchability (Blees et al, 2015;Tang and Yin, 2017), negative Poisson's ratio (Hou et al, 2014;Del Broccolo et al, 2017), and stretch-induced buckling (Isobe and Okumura, 2016;Rafsanjani and Bertoldi, 2017). Given that cutting is scalable, kirigami principles have found applications in many engineered systems with vastly different scales, like nano/mesoscale devices (Xu et al, 2018), composite laminates (Lele et al, 2019), wearable sensors (Xu et al, 2019), and robotics (Firouzeh et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2021). In particular, kirigami skin has been combined with other soft actuators to improve the performance of crawling robots by significantly increasing the friction between the robotic body and its surrounding medium (Rafsanjani et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pneumatic Soft Actuators With Kirigami Skins

Khosravi

Iannucci

2021

Front. Robot. AI

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Soft pneumatic actuators have become indispensable for many robotic applications due to their reliability, safety, and design flexibility. However, the currently available actuator designs can be challenging to fabricate, requiring labor-intensive and time-consuming processes like reinforcing fiber wrapping and elastomer curing. To address this issue, we propose to use simple-to-fabricate kirigami skins—plastic sleeves with carefully arranged slit cuts—to construct pneumatic actuators with pre-programmable motion capabilities. Such kirigami skin, wrapped outside a cylindrical balloon, can transform the volumetric expansion from pneumatic pressure into anisotropic stretching and shearing, creating a combination of axial extension and twisting in the actuator. Moreover, the kirigami skin exhibits out-of-plane buckling near the slit cut, which enables high stretchability. To capture such complex deformations, we formulate and experimentally validates a new kinematics model to uncover the linkage between the kirigami cutting pattern design and the actuator’s motion characteristics. This model uses a virtual fold and rigid-facet assumption to simplify the motion analysis without sacrificing accuracy. Moreover, we tested the pressure-stroke performance and elastoplastic behaviors of the kirigami-skinned actuator to establish an operation protocol for repeatable performance. Analytical and experimental parametric analysis shows that one can effectively pre-program the actuator’s motion performance, with considerable freedom, simply by adjusting the angle and length of the slit cuts. The results of this study can establish the design and analysis framework for a new family of kirigami-skinned pneumatic actuators for many robotic applications.

show abstract

Grasping with kirigami shells

Cited by 114 publications

References 57 publications

Boundary curvature guided programmable shape-morphing kirigami sheets

Boundary curvature guided programmable shape-morphing kirigami sheets

A 3D Printed Modular Soft Gripper Integrated With Metamaterials for Conformal Grasping

Pneumatic Soft Actuators With Kirigami Skins

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About