A 0.5-meter-scale, high-load, soft-enclosed gripper capable of grasping the human body

Developing large, soft grippers with high omnidirectional load (above 40 kg) has always been challenging. We address this challenge by developing a powerful soft gripper that can grasp the human body based on a soft-enclosed grasping structure and a soft-rigid coupling structure. The envelope size of the proposed soft gripper is 611.6 mm × 559 mm × 490.7 mm, the maximum grasping size is 417 mm, and the payload on the human body is more than 90 kg, which has exceeded most existing soft grippers. Furthermore, the grasping force prediction of the gripper is achieved through theoretical modeling. The primary contribution of this work is to overcome the size and payload limits of current soft grippers and implement a human-grasping experiment based on the soft-grasping method.