Design of a Flexible Capture Mechanism Inspired by Sea Anemone for Non-cooperative Targets

Robotic grippers have been used in industry as end-effectors but are usually limited to operations in pre-defined workspace. However, few devices can capture irregularly shaped dynamic targets in space, underwater and other unstructured environments. In this paper, a novel continuum arm group mechanism inspired by the morphology and motions of sea anemones is proposed. It is able to dissipate and absorb the kinetic energy of a fast moving target in omni-direction and utilize multiple arms to wrap and lock the target without accurate positioning control. Wire-driven actuation systems are implemented in the individual continuum arms, achieving both bending motion and stiffness regulation. Through finite element method, the influence of different configurations of the continuum arm group on the capture performance is analyzed. A robotic prototype is constructed and tested, showing the presented arm group mechanism has high adaptability to capture targets with different sizes, shapes, and incident angles.