Octopuses exploit an efficient neuromuscular hierarchy to achieve complex dexterous body manipulation, integrating sensor-rich suckers, in-arm embodied computation, and centralized higher-level reasoning. Here, we take inspiration from the hierarchical intelligence of the octopus and demonstrate how, by exploiting the fluidic energy and information capacity of simple suction cups, soft computational elements, and soft actuators, we can mimic key aspects of the neuromuscular structure of the octopus in soft robotic systems. The presented suction intelligence works at two levels: By coupling suction flow with local fluidic circuitry, soft robots can achieve octopus-like low-level embodied intelligence, including gently grasping delicate objects, adaptive curling, and encapsulating objects of unknown geometries, and by decoding the pressure response from a suction cup, robots can achieve multimodal high-level perception, including contact detection, classification of an environmental medium and surface roughness, and prediction of an interactive pulling force. As in octopuses, suction intelligence executes most of its computation within lower-level local fluidic circuitries, and minimum information is transmitted to the high-level decision-making of the “brain.” This development provides insights into octopus-inspired machine intelligence through low-cost, simple, and easy-to-integrate methods. The presented suction intelligence can be readily integrated into fluidic-driven soft robots to enhance their intelligence and reduce their computational requirement and can be applied widely, from industrial object handling and robotic manufacturing to robot-assisted harvesting and interventional health care.

The growing need for soft robots with secure, adaptive, and autonomous functioning in unforeseen environments favors designs with multiple functionalities. This has driven soft robotic grippers to be explored to integrate perceptual capability for augmented multifunctionality. In nature, sea anemones can detect and catch preys of various shapes and sizes effectively with extremely simple bodies because of the efficient coupling of sensing and actuation capability. Inspired by their body structures, we present a bistable gripper with multifunctionality that includes sensing (proprioceptive and exteroceptive) and multimodal gripping (grasping and pinching). The gripper exploits an array of tapered pins on the external surface of a dome membrane for gripping and a set of cylindrical markers on the internal surface of the membrane for optical sensing. The membrane is bistable and can settle in either of two equilibrium states “natural” and “retracted.” Gripping functionality is achieved by the centripetal enveloping movement of the pins, along with the passive snap-through process of the membrane. By analyzing the distribution of markers within the view of an embedded camera, sophisticated sensing functionality can be achieved. We first characterized each function separately and then implemented an object handling system, combining the sensing and gripping functionality, to demonstrate the potential for more advanced robotic applications. This work delivers a compact universal gripper design with an efficient and elegant integration of multifunctionality.

The sensor morphology is of great importance, especially for tactile sensors that mainly transduce physical contacts to perceivable signals for further processing by the central system. Sensors with various morphology can result in different signal thus potentially influencing perception. Most previous researches on tactile sensor morphology focused on revealing advance of a particular morphology in a binary manner, by providing sensors with and without that morphology then comparing the performance. Less attention was paid to sensors with changeable morphology. This letter demonstrates a wrinkled soft tactile sensor with variable morphology, leading to tunable sensing and perception property. Specifically, the geometrical structure of wrinkles and the overall stiffness of the sensor can be varied by changing the sensor bending state. This morphing behavior was modeled analytically and verified by both Finite Element Analysis and real experiment. Furthermore, these morphological variations were found to closely affect the performance of sensor in three tasks including force sensing, shape discrimination and texture detection. Interestingly, for each task, there was always an optimal morphological state that maximized the sensor performance, namely force sensitivity and perception accuracy. This sheds light to novel active tactile sensing system design, thus realizing "active" by adapting morphology instead of sensorimotor control algorithm to optimize perception gain.

Soft robotics, including soft grippers and manipulators, are increasingly required to function more adaptively and securely in unknown environments. However, conventional soft pneumatic grippers often grasp and hold objects via the active bending of multiple fingers, making it challenging to grip and hold, for example, spiny objects safely because of the potential damage to the pneumatic chambers. In this letter, inspired by the entanglement behavior of plant tendrils, we propose a soft, pneumatic, fail-safe gripper. The fail-safe property is guaranteed by two mechanisms, the passive entanglement and the redundant contacts. Specifically, the gripper exploits an array of tentacle fingers that actively extend and passively entangle for entanglement grasping. To understand the working principle, we studied the entanglement behavior of a single tentacle finger by both analytical modeling and finite element method simulation. We also characterized the griping capability of this gripper in a series of different grasping experiments. The gripper was demonstrated to be capable of grasping a range of different objects, from artificial ones with simple shapes to real-world targets with complex shapes. We finally showcased the fail-safe property of this gripper in a pick-and-lift task by comparing the performance of this gripper with that of a conventional gripper when the two grippers are manually damaged. This work paves the way for the development of soft pneumatic grippers with fail-safe and reliable grasping.