This Uber-Gentle Soft Robotic Gripper Can Catch Jellyfish Without Harming Them

To most people, jellyfish are a nuisance at best or a terrifying predator intent on ruining your beach holiday at worst. But even though they have no brain to speak of, their unique biology has a lot of potential for scientific breakthroughs. It’s already common for scientists to use their green fluorescent protein (GFP) to study gene expression. Some jellyfish are also essentially immortal, and their biology could be the key to fighting our own aging process. But to study them, biologists need to catch them. That’s what this uber-gentle soft robotic gripper is designed for.

Jellyfish are made up of approximately 95 percent water, which makes them very delicate and difficult for remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) to grasp without damaging them. While soft robotic grippers that are designed specifically for fragile marine animals already exist, even those use too much force for jellysfish. Those existing grippers exert around 1 kPa (kilopascal) of pressure, while this new ultra-gentle soft robotic grippers only uses about 0.0455 kPa. That allows it to safely catch and release even the most flimsy jellyfish without hurting them.

The gripper was designed by a team of roboticists from Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and CUNY’s Baruch College. It has a total of six long, thin fingers arrayed around the “palm.” Each of those fingers is a soft and flexible silicone tube with one side covered in a layer of polymer nanofibers. Those nanofibers are stiffer than the surrounding silicone. When water is pumped into the tubes, the fingers curl around towards the side with the nanofibers. That happens quickly enough to catch drifting jellyfish, but the fingers aren’t capable of exerting enough force to damage them. In aquarium testing, the gripper was able to successfully catch a variety of small jellyfish without arm. By equipping ROVs with this robotic gripper, marine biologists can collect new species of jellyfish to study.