A bioinspired gripper with continuously stable structure

Conventional grippers struggle to reconcile the flexibility of soft structures with the robustness of rigid structures. To address this challenge, we draw inspiration from a cat’s paw and design a gripper with passive continuous stability, which effectively reproduces the functional repertoire of a cat’s paw. Its fingers can extend and retract, while a force sensor embedded in the paw pad enables object detection and force monitoring. Leveraging the friction‐locking mechanism of a gooseneck, the fingers bend and remain fixed in arbitrary postures without requiring continuous power input. This study is the first to reveal the underlying mechanism of the gooseneck and to establish and experimentally validate its static model. Experimental results show that without requiring continuous energy input, the gripper sustains a holding force of up to 56 N under static conditions and can stably grasp a 150 g object even under pulsed accelerations reaching 240 m/s². Grasping diversity experiments demonstrate the versatility and potential of this mechanism for harvesting, industrial automation, and field robotics. Depending on the configuration, it can achieve automatic object detection and grasping, perch on a rod without consuming energy, or serve as a soft landing mechanism to absorb impact during rapid descent.