Flexible robotic manipulators have significant advantages especially when the capturing task involves strong collisions in engineering. This work introduces a new design of the inflatable manipulator inspired by fluidic origami structures to perform capturing process. To analyze the dynamic inflation and exhaustion processes of fluidic origami structures, a universal framework combining the particle-bar-spring model with the finite particle method is proposed. Fluid effects are considered by fluid–solid interaction, and the analysis of the inflation process of the original fluidic origami structure helps to verify the validity of the proposed method. Contact model is built to consider the collision in the capturing process. The newly designed inflatable manipulator can achieve overall bending and capture the target successfully. The motion trajectory and capturing process of the inflatable manipulator are simulated and analyzed. A prototype of the inflatable manipulator is processed to perform experimental investigations. The experimental results obtained by the digital image correlation technique are consistent with the numerical results. This work not only provides a new kind of inflatable manipulators inspired by fluidic origami structures, but also proposes a framework to analyze the fluidic origami structures.

灵活的机器人机械手具有显着优势，尤其是当捕获任务涉及工程中的强烈碰撞时。这项工作介绍了一种受流体折纸结构启发的充气机械手的新设计，以执行捕获过程。为分析流体折纸结构的动态膨胀和耗竭过程，提出了粒子-杆-弹簧模型与有限粒子方法相结合的通用框架。流固相互作用考虑了流体效应，对原始流体折纸结构膨胀过程的分析有助于验证所提方法的有效性。建立接触模型以考虑捕获过程中的碰撞。全新设计的充气机械手可实现整体弯曲，成功捕获目标。对充气机械手的运动轨迹和捕捉过程进行了仿真分析。处理充气机械手的原型以进行实验研究。数字图像相关技术得到的实验结果与数值结果一致。这项工作不仅提供了一种受流体折纸结构启发的新型充气机械手，而且还提出了一个分析流体折纸结构的框架。