Collaboration on Implementation of Octopus-inspired Manipulation Strategies in Soft Continuum Robot Arms with Artificial Suction Cups

Inspired by the octopus, Prof. Rob SCHARFF's team has developed artificial suction cups that can grasp objects and sense their surroundings. The artificial suction cups could enable the implementation of octopus-inspired manipulation strategies in soft continuum robot arms. The research conducted by first author Stein VAN VEGGEL (TU Delft) was a collaboration between HKUST, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), and the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). 

Published in Advanced Intelligent Systems, the paper titled “Optoelectronically Innervated Suction Cup Inspired by the Octopus” introduces a 3D-printed octopus-inspired suction cup with integrated colored markers. Tactile information is collected using an embedded camera that captures the displacement of these markers upon contact between the suction cup and its environment. This information could be employed to accurately estimate the orientation of the suction cup with respect to an object surface. The effectiveness of the approach was demonstrated in a closed-loop control scheme where the suction cup could successfully pick up randomly oriented objects by approaching the object surface perpendicularly.  
 
The work was motivated by the findings from a literature review on artificial suction cups by the same authors published in Advanced Science. In this work, titled “Classification and Evaluation of Octopus-Inspired Suction Cups for Soft Continuum Robots”, the authors identified the lack of high-resolution tactile sensors for artificial suction cups as one of the major hurdles towards the realization of octopus-like dexterous manipulation capabilities in soft continuum robot arms.