A variable caliber gripper imitated the snake swallowing behavior

Abstract

With the increasing variety of objects, the application potential of flexible adaptive gripper is further expanded, so it has become an urgent fact to design low-cost and lightweight adaptive flexible gripper. Inspired by the prey swallowing behavior of snake, an encompassing flexible gripper is proposed to imitate the swallowing behavior of snake. The low-cost material braided fiber tube (BFT) is used as the snake's mouth, and by controlling the caliber size of the BFT to control the gripping and releasing, the swallowing gripping of the gripper is similar to the snake's prey-swallowing behavior. The gripper is designed to achieve adaptive gripping of objects of different shapes and weights by controlling the contraction of the BFT and then controlling the output force. Tested with tip-shaped and bar-shaped objects, the results showed that the gripper had a strong ability to adapt to its shape. This work can provide an innovative idea for the design of lightweight, miniaturized, low-cost, shape-adaptive flexible gripper.