A bionic soft tongue driven by shape memory alloy and pneumatics

Soft grippers have exhibited considerable advantages owing to their flexible deformation, compliant
operation, and safe interaction with objects. The ability to grip solid and liquid objects can
greatly expand the application range of the soft grippers. Dogs stick out their tongues and then
curl them backward to form a ladle shape for eating food and drinking water. The large extension
ratio and the ladling motion of the tongues endow dogs with flexible operations for both solids and
liquids. In this work, inspired by both the extending and ladling motions of dog tongues, a bionic
soft tongue with the capability of handling solid and liquid objects was designed. The bionic soft
tongue was composed of a tongue base and a tongue tip, which were driven by pneumatics and shape
memory alloy wires, respectively. The tongue base was capable of linearly elongating and contracting
with a considerable scale, while the tongue tip could be curled into a ladle shape to grasp objects.
The dyn...

Source: Bioinspiration and Biomimetics - August 10, 2021 Category: Science Authors: Ning Gong, Hu Jin, Shuaishuai Sun, Shixin Mao, Weihua Li and Shiwu Zhang Source Type: research