Disposable Soft Robotic Gripper Fablicated from Ribbon Paper with a Few Steps of Origami Folding

Abstract

An easy-to-make paper-crafted robotic gripper for food manipulation was proposed. The gripper is fabricated from ribbon paper in a few tens of seconds only by folding and engaging without adhesives. The gripper forms a four-linkage underactuated mechanism which realizes human-finger-like grasping. Simply sliding a gripper edge into a shaft slit of a rotational motor, the gripper is instantly attached and detached from a robot. Therefore, it is expected to realize a practically disposable gripper. By experiments of repeatedly grasping some foods, the reliability and durability of the gripper were shown. The gripper’s spring effect, naturally given by paper material, was shown to hold slippery and irregular-shaped foods firmly.