Soft robotic grippers are essential for grasping delicate, geometrically complex objects in manufacturing, healthcare and agriculture. However, existing grippers struggle to grasp feature-rich objects with high topological variability, including gears with sharp tooth profiles on automotive assembly lines, corals with fragile protrusions, or vegetables with irregular branching structures like broccoli. Unlike simple geometric primitives such as cubes or spheres, feature-rich objects lack a clear "optimal" contact surface, making them both difficult to grasp and susceptible to damage when grasped by existing gripper designs. Safe handling of such objects therefore requires specialized soft grippers whose morphology is tailored to the object's features. Topology optimization offers a promising approach for producing specialized grippers, but its utility is limited by the requirement for pre-defined load cases. For soft grippers interacting with feature-rich objects, these loads arise from hundreds of unpredictable gripper-object contact forces during grasping and are unknown a priori. To address this problem, we introduce SimTO, a framework that enables high-resolution topology optimization by automatically extracting load cases from a contact-based physics simulator, eliminating the need for manual load specification. Given an arbitrary feature-rich object, SimTO produces highly customized soft grippers with fine-grained morphological features tailored to the object geometry. Numerical results show our designs are not only highly specialized to feature-rich objects, but also generalize to unseen objects.

翻译：软体机器人夹持器在制造业、医疗保健和农业中对于抓取精细、几何结构复杂的物体至关重要。然而，现有夹持器难以有效抓取具有高拓扑变异性的特征丰富物体，例如汽车装配线上具有尖锐齿廓的齿轮、带有脆弱突起的珊瑚，或具有不规则分支结构（如西兰花）的蔬菜。与立方体或球体等简单几何基元不同，特征丰富物体缺乏明确的“最优”接触表面，这使得它们既难以抓取，又易被现有夹持器设计在抓取时损坏。因此，安全处理此类物体需要专门的软体夹持器，其形态需根据物体特征进行定制。拓扑优化为制造专用夹持器提供了一种有前景的方法，但其应用受到预定义载荷工况要求的限制。对于与特征丰富物体交互的软体夹持器，这些载荷源于抓取过程中数百种不可预测的夹持器-物体接触力，且无法预先获知。为解决此问题，我们提出了SimTO框架，该框架通过从基于接触的物理仿真器中自动提取载荷工况，实现了高分辨率拓扑优化，无需人工指定载荷。给定任意特征丰富物体，SimTO能够生成高度定制的软体夹持器，其细粒度形态特征与物体几何结构精确适配。数值结果表明，我们的设计不仅对特征丰富物体具有高度专一性，还能泛化至未见过的物体。