Soft MRE Gripper: Preliminary Study

Soft robotics focuses on the imitation of the work of living organisms and mostly utilizes soft deformable materials for actuation or object manipulation tasks. Soft robots or grippers can be used for tasks which are beyond the reach of conventional rigid body ones. Recently, soft flexible robotic grippers have attracted research and engineering interest. A variety of materials and actuation technologies incl. magnetorheological (MR) materials have been used for developing grippers for grasping and object manipulation purposes. The study provides an insight into a magnetorheological elastomer (MRE) based gripper that is capable of adapting to a variety of objects shapes. The authors reveal the gripper’s operating principle, the actuation mechanism, the gripper’s evaluation procedure and the results of a testing programme to examine the soft gripper’s operation with respect to its ability to adapt to objects of various shapes and sizes.