A soft and shape-adaptive electroadhesive composite gripper with proprioceptive and exteroceptive capabilities

Electroadhesion is a promising adhesion mechanism for robotics and material handling applications with advantages over existing technologies including enhanced adaptability, gentle/flexible handling, reduced complexity, and ultra-low energy consumption. Current electroadhesive (EA) grippers, however, require extra components and their associated electronics to make them sensorially capable. In addition, current planar EA grippers have difficulty adhering to non-planar surfaces and picking up non-flat objects. We present a monolithic, shape-adaptive, and self-sensing EA composite with integral dielectric elastomer actuation (DEA). This new EA-DEA composite gripper is not only proprioceptive (it can sense internal deformations) and exteroceptive (it can sense and differentiate between surfaces that it touches) but can also actively morph and adapt to curved surfaces. By integrating a high voltage self-sensing unit with the EA-DEA composite, coupled gripping and sensing capabilities can be achieved. This is because combined actions of membrane deformations by the Maxwell force and surface attraction by the EA force can be obtained by using only one voltage source due to the employment of a dual-mode parallel-and-coplanar electrode pattern. The proposed approach has the potential to significantly improve the intelligence of EA gripping technologies and increase their use in intelligent material sorting, grasping, and manipulation applications.