Design of an Iris-Inspired Tactile Gripper for Aerial Grasping

This paper presents an iris-inspired tactile gripper system for aerial grasping. Unlike previous grippers designed for aerial robots, the proposed gripper integrates compliant tactile sensors that provide both passive adaptability and active sensing capability. First, we design the mechanical structure of the gripper based on the radially symmetric contraction mechanism of the biological iris. It uses a single motor to actuate an embedded cable for the synchronized opening and closing of six fingers. Then, three of the rigid fingers are replaced with TacTip optical tactile sensors, which enable contact perception by tracking internal marker displacements and support feedback-driven grasp control. Finally, a multistage grasping strategy is developed that uses a finite-state machine to achieve a stable grasp. Experimental results show that the proposed system significantly improves the grasp success rate compared with a baseline gripper without tactile sensing. Preliminary integration with a quadrotor UAV platform is also demonstrated, highlighting the potential of the system for aerial manipulation tasks.