Robots manipulating fragile items like fruit or assisting elderly patients require exceedingly delicate touch lacking in traditional rigid grippers. Now bioinspired engineers at Japan’s Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have developed an ingenious solution mimicking the supple grasp of flowering plants. Their rotating, squeezing gripper named ROSE gently envelops objects uniformly—living up to its namesake.

Conventional gripper designs utilizing blunt pinchers or vacuum suction cups poorly mimic natural manipulation, instead often crushing fragile items like ripe fruit or inadvertently hurting patients during care. Soft rubber fingers proved inadequate resolving these shortcomings.

Inspiration instead came from an unlikely muse: the gentle yet firm grip of flowering plants cradling reproductive organs. Just as a rose’s petals uniformly squeeze around pollen-producing stamens, researchers engineered an artificial budding flower to replicate that smooth, all-encompassing grasp.

The lifelike ROSE gripper consists of a flexible funnel-shaped sleeve made of soft elastomer composites attached to a rotating rigid base. Controlled by an electric actuator, the base spins like a turntable, causing the pliant petal-like sleeve to twist around objects settled inside its tapered point.

The sleeve’s rubbery texture and twisting actuation ensure exceptionally uniform pressure distribution across an object’s surface, eliminating damaging stress concentrations. The greater an object’s diameter, the more the sleeve creases around its contours in iris-like fashion, achieving reliable support across varied shapes and sizes. And the mechanism’s intrinsic compliance self-limits contact forces, preventing damage to fragile contents.

ROSE’s supple responsiveness hence combines strengths of rigid and soft grippers. Tests show it exceeding traditional models in reliability, durability, and cost while reliably manipulating items from fruits to eggs to tools. Even after 400,000 operational cycles, ROSE maintained robust performance with no loss of grip strength while traditional models failed after hundreds of trials.

Such exceptional versatility and gentleness suits ROSE for widespread adoption across settings valuing non-destructive handling. Examples span delicate biomedical and electronics assembly to agricultural robotic harvesting where bruising renders fruit unsellable. It also shows promise assisting elderly patients during daily living activities, with its secure yet gentle wrap facilitating interaction without discomfort.

Commercialization efforts now underway include mobile fruit pickers and patient home helpers. More speculatively, self-improving algorithms tuning grip pressure may one day yield responsive robot hands attaining human-like manipulative finesse.

Either way, ROSE’s serendipitous floral inspiration proves rendering cutting-edge engineering more lifelike can unlock new performance frontiers. Much as natural designs bestowed suppleness, efficiency and adaptability through eons of evolutionary honing, bioinspired bots set to bloom a new age of capable yet caring assistance.