A leaf-based version of the robotic gripper
Hong, Y., Zhao, Y., Berman, J. et al.
A robotic gripper made from flexible ribbons can pick up objects as delicate as a dandelion to something 16,000 times heavier than itself.
Most robotic grippers are specialised to perform a narrow set of tasks, but performing well in one domain often entails a trade-off. A tool well suited to picking up heavy objects, for example, normally struggles to manipulate much lighter, intricate objects.
Jie Yin at North Carolina State University and his colleagues have developed a gripper that avoids much of …