A Passively Conforming Soft Robotic Gripper with Three-Dimensional Negative Bending Stiffness Fingers.

Robot grippers that lack physical compliance have a difficult time dealing with uncertainty, such as fragile objects that may not have well-defined shapes. Existing soft robotic grippers require a large empty workspace for their actuated fingers to curl around the objects of interest, limiting their performance in clutter. This article presents a three-dimensional structure that exhibits negative stiffness in every bending direction used as fingers in a class of soft robotic grippers.