Octopuses can employ their tapered arms to catch prey of all shapes and sizes due to their dexterity, flexibility, and gripping power. Intrigued by variability in arm taper angle between different octopus species, we explored the utility of designing soft actuators exhibiting a distinctive conical geometry, compared with more traditional cylindrical forms. We find that these octopus-inspired conical-shaped actuators exhibit a wide range of bending curvatures that can be tuned by simply altering their taper angle and they also demonstrate greater flexibility compared with their cylindrical counterparts. The taper angle and bending curvature are inversely related, whereas taper angle and applied bending force are directly related. To further expand the functionality of our soft actuators, we incorporated vacuum-actuated suckers into the actuators for the production of a fully integrated octopus arm-inspired gripper. Notably, our results reveal that because of their enhanced flexibility, these tapered actuators with suckers have better gripping power than their cylindrical-shaped counterparts and require significantly larger forces to be detached from both flat and curved surfaces. Finally, we show that by choosing appropriate taper angles, our tapered actuators with suckers can grip, move, and place a remarkably wide range of objects with flat, nonplanar, smooth, or rough surfaces, as well as retrieve objects through narrow openings. The results from this study not only provide new design insights into the creation of next-generation soft actuators for gripping a wide range of morphologically diverse objects but also contribute to our understanding of the functional significance of arm taper angle variability across octopus species.

中文翻译：

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八达通臂式锥形软致动器，带有吸盘，可提高抓握力

由于章鱼的灵巧性、灵活性和抓握力，章鱼可以利用它们的锥形手臂捕捉各种形状和大小的猎物。不同章鱼物种之间臂锥角的变化引起了我们的兴趣，我们探索了与更传统的圆柱形相比，设计具有独特锥形几何形状的软致动器的效用。我们发现这些受章鱼启发的锥形致动器表现出广泛的弯曲曲率，可以通过简单地改变它们的锥角来进行调整，并且与圆柱形对应物相比，它们还表现出更大的灵活性。锥角和弯曲曲率成反比，而锥角和施加的弯曲力直接相关。为了进一步扩展我们的软执行器的功能，我们将真空驱动的吸盘整合到执行器中，以生产完全集成的章鱼臂式抓手。值得注意的是，我们的研究结果表明，由于具有更高的灵活性，这些带有吸盘的锥形执行器比圆柱形对应物具有更好的抓握力，并且需要更大的力才能从平面和曲面上分离。最后，我们表明，通过选择适当的锥角，我们的带吸盘的锥形执行器可以抓取、移动和放置范围非常广泛的平面、非平面、光滑或粗糙表面的物体，以及通过狭窄的开口取回物体。