Octopus Robo-Grip

Short answer: In February 2020, researchers from Beihang University, Harvard's Wyss Institute and Harvard SEAS, and the automation company Festo published a study in Soft Robotics on octopus arm-inspired tapered soft actuators with suckers.

Zhexin Xie and August Domel were co-first authors, and Katia Bertoldi and Li Wen were co-senior authors. The team measured how much octopus arms taper and found that a cone-shaped silicone actuator bends into a wider range of curvatures than a cylindrical one. A steeper taper curls less tightly but pushes with more force. The researchers added suction cups modeled on those of the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris), shrinking from base to tip, and all linked to a single vacuum line. The arm runs on two valves: one pressurizes it to bend, and one applies vacuum to the suckers. Harvard's press release says it gripped thin plastic sheets, mugs, test tubes, eggs, smartphones, exercise balls and even live crabs, and could reach into narrow openings. Xie is also co-inventor of the Festo Tentacle Gripper, a commercial prototype of the idea. In 2023, a Beihang-led team with Li Wen and Cecilia Laschi reported a sensorized soft octopus arm (E-SOAM) in Science Robotics that bends and elongates to reach and grasp. The footage shows a robot arm whose multi-tentacle gripper curls around a ball, a box, a hat and a plant, a demonstration of the same tapered, suction-cup design.

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