A Scalable Pneumatic Soft Gripper With Modular Silicone Fingers for Adaptive Grasping

Soft robotic grippers show exceptional promise for handling delicate, irregular objects, but face a tradeoff between high-precision manipulation and heavy-payload capability. As per the authors’ knowledge, there is a lack of existing systems that offer hardware-level modularity for on-demand reconfiguration. To overcome the existing gap, the article presents a modular and scalable pneumatic soft gripper with quick-swappable silicone fingers. The proposed methodology combines (1) magnetically coupled modular fingers (swapped in <5 s), (2) parametrically scaled PneuNet actuators (S → L sizes), and (3) self-sealing pneumatic interfaces. The experiments show linear payload scaling from 0.32 kg (60 mm fingers) to 4.23 kg (150 mm fingers) (R2 = 0.98), 96.4% grasp success across fragile, irregular, and heavy objects, and 100% swap reliability over 200 cycles. This work enables a single gripper to adapt from micro-precision to heavy-payload tasks, advancing soft robotics toward cross-domain automation.