Search

A 3D‐printed pneumatically actuated soft suction gripper with an elastomer film is proposed. Suction in such gripper is actively controlled by applying a negative pressure behind the film. The elastomeric gripper body is 3D‐printed, making it easy to customize and integrate into future robotic gripping systems. The gripper can pick a wide variety of objects, such as delicate fruits, small parts, and parts with uneven loads, with high pull‐off forces (over 7.4 N with ∅ 20 mm/55 kPa). The achieved pull‐off forces are significantly higher than the previously reported suction cup grippers with films and more comparable with commercial vacuum grippers. The pull‐off forces show no significant differences with surfaces of varying roughness (up to root‐mean‐square roughness of 5.66 μm) and the gripper is able to pick and release target objects repeatedly. The gripper is also compared with a commercial vacuum gripper with comparable dimensions. It outperforms the commercial gripper in the case of fragile objects, objects smaller than the gripper diameter, and objects with uneven loads. It can apply high pull‐off forces while having controllable release, and is suitable for gripping a wide variety of real‐world objects, including heavy, rough, small, thin, and fragile ones.

Bioinspired, highly flexible, fast, and biodegradable heaters are fabricated based on Ag nanowires and leaf skeletons of different plant species. The leaf skeletons act as transparent substrates with a high surface-area-to-volume ratio and allow a uniform dispersion of the Ag nanowires through the surface. Ag nanowires adhered to the leaf skeletons display very good transmittance (up to ≈87%) and mechanical (flexibility) properties (curvature values >800 m−1) without any post-treatment. The flexible leaf skeleton-based heaters reach high temperatures very quickly, with very low voltages (

In biomedical sciences, there is demand for electronic skins with highly sensitive tactile sensors, having applications in patient monitoring, human–machine interfaces, and on-body sensors. In clinical applications, it would be especially beneficial if the sensors would be disposable. Here, an all plant-material-based biodegradable capacitive tactile pressure sensor for disposable electronic skins is reported. Silver-nanowire-coated leaf skeletons are used as breathable and flexible electrodes while freeze-dried rose petals are used as the dielectric layer. The leaf skeleton electrodes have a rough fractal-like architecture, which provides good adhesion to the silver nanowires and maintains interconnections between the silver nanowires when the electrodes are bent. The electrodes display low constant resistance up to curvature of 800 m−1. The rose petal dielectric layer has a multiscale 3D cell wall microstructure, which compresses elastically when subjected to pressure. The fabricated sensor can respond to pressures ranging from 0.007 to at least 60 kPa, with a maximum sensitivity of ≈0.08 kPa−1. The signal is stable for at least 5000 pressure cycles, after an initial break-in period. Owing to the all biomaterial constituents, the sensor is biodegradable under aqueous conditions. The sensor is successfully applied as an e-skin in touch sensing and gesture monitoring. publishedVersion