A bionic soft actuator for gripper based on pneumatic metastructure and design method for it

In order to achieve fast and convenient design of fully flexible actuators suitable for special gripping modes, a soft actuator for gripper based on pneumatic metastructure is proposed inspired by the pulvinus of <i>Mimosa pudica.</i> The hyperelastic material is used to fabricate the soft actuators. Finite element models are built to analyze and predict the deformation of both the single unit cell and entire metastructures. Finally, the automatic design method is presented. The actuators designed corresponding to the modes are fabricated and tested. The experimental results show that the gripper achieves a higher grasping stability in special gripping modes.