Soft and strong gripper combining electroadhesion and DEA

Two groups at the EPFL developed a novel method to create soft and compliant grippers based on combining electrostatic actuation (bending driven by DEAs) with an optimized electroadhesion force, which enables us to manipulate deformable, fragile objects of any shape with a single control signal. To illustrate the impressive abilities of our device, we developed a compliant gripper, weighing only 1.5 g. The two-fingered gripper safely picks up very challenging objects to handle including a raw egg, a piece o