ArticleBody:Unlike their octopus cousins, a cuttlefish’s 10 tentacles aren’t necessarily equally sized. While the small cephalopod possesses four same-length pairs, its other two appendages extend and contract as needed to more easily capture their prey. And although a new robot designed by engineers at China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University isn’t going on the hunt anytime soon, its trio of grippers can clutch and manipulate a wide array of objects much like their cuttlefish inspiration.
To customize each finger’s length and tension, handlers inflated the origami chambers with positive pneumatic pressure while creating “an antagonistic actuation system with the cables, making the finger stiffness tunable via active controlling of the input pressure value,” the team writes.