Fig. 4: Morphing-enabled adaptive and energy-saving grasping.

a The first shape-morphing gripper has an SMM as the base and two compliant fingers that can pinch an object. Without shape morphing, the soft finger cannot reach a small object. With morphing capability, we can morph the base to let the soft finger pinch the object. b The size of objects that the morphing gripper can grasp is 8 times larger than a normal gripper with a stiff base. The error bars represent the standard deviation from the three experiments. c The morphing gripper uses pinching to grasp a sponge, a Coke can, and a Ping Pong ball. d The second shape-morphing gripper enables energy-saving grasping. Left, a soft gripper with rigid ends needs to continuously supply energy to hold an object. Right, the morphing gripper can hold an object without additional energy input. Both grippers have four rigid ends to cage an object. e The energy consumption comparison of a normal soft gripper with the second morphing gripper. Once the morphing gripper becomes rigid, it does not require energy input, while the normal soft gripper keeps consuming energy. f The morphing gripper can morph to different angles to adapt to different shapes of the objects, such as a gauge of thread, a computer mouse, and an egg. The green bar indicates the distance between the two tips of the gripper after grasping.