A Review of Somatic Design for Soft Robotic Grippers: From Parts Integration to Functional Synergy

Somatic design is crucial for soft grippers to emulate the embodied intelligence of their biological counterparts, due to the blurry boundaries among material, structure, and function. There are five critical parts in somatic design, including morphology, material, fabrication, actuation, and variable stiffness. The strong nonlinear coupling among these factors often leads to mutual influence and functional compromise after integration. Herein, methods and strategies harnessed in these parts for performance improvement of soft grippers are systematically reviewed, particularly clarifying how to exert the coupling enhancement effects of the somatic parts for functional synergy. Finally, the remaining challenges and the future development directions of soft grippers for organism-like intelligence and wide-range applications are discussed. Somatic design is crucial for soft grippers to emulate the embodied intelligence of their biological counterparts, due to the blurry boundaries among material, structure and function. There are five critical parts in somatic design, including morphology, material, fabrication, actuation, and variable stiffness. The strong nonlinear coupling among these factors often leads to mutual influence and functional compromise after integration. Existing excellent reviews about soft grippers tend to focus more on summarizing and discussing the partial factors of somatic design, and ignore the importance of somatic-part collaborative design. In this review, a systematic somatic design guide that covers all five parts while investigating their functional synergy is provided. The remaining challenges and the future development directions of soft grippers for organism-like intelligence and wide-range applications are discussed.image (c) 2024 WILEY-VCH GmbH