Soft Robotic Gripper: From Steel Jaws to ABB FlexPickers

A soft robotic gripper holds things with rubbery fingers that bend around an object, while a classic gripper clamps it between hard jaws or grabs it with a vacuum cup. Harvard's early designs and the first commercial versions ran on compressed air. In early October 2026 researchers in Madrid and Navarra showed a soft gripper with tendon-driven fingers that can turn an object in its grasp without letting go. This post follows the idea from the Unimate's steel grip through Harvard's air-powered robots to ABB FlexPickers that pack pastries with soft fingers, and looks at where it goes next.

Soft blue fingers fed by an air hose on one of the four ABB FlexPicker robots that pack pastries at Delicato in Sweden. Photo: ABB

From the Unimate's steel grip to rubber fingers

The first industrial robot, the Unimate, started work in 1961 on a General Motors line at the Inland Fisher Guide plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, where it carried die castings. George Devol had filed the patent in 1954 and built the business with Joseph Engelberger. The grippers that followed fall into a few families. Impactive grippers use jaws or claws. Two-finger versions suit robots that do one specific task, and their fingers are shaped to match the part. Astrictive grippers hold by attraction instead, and vacuum cups and electromagnets dominate in car plants and sheet metal handling.

A Unimate robot pours coffee for Betty Myrah with its metal gripper at the Biltmore Hotel, 1967. Photo: Frank Q. Brown, Los Angeles Times / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Hard grippers work best when every part is the same and arrives in the same place. A traditional gripper "has to know exact location of the object", Soft Robotics chief executive Carl Vause said in 2017. It has to plan its path, and sensors on the fingers make it squeeze just enough but not too much. A 2018 ABB Review article made the same point: most robot solutions were built on hard linkages, which made soft and variable objects such as fresh produce hard to pick up. It added that only 12 percent of non-automotive industries were automated by robots, because nothing handled unstructured tasks or variable products well.

A Kawasaki robot with a vacuum gripper stacks furniture parts on a palletizing line built by de Man Automation + Service, 2018. Photo: De Man Automation + Service / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Soft designs came out of research labs. In 2010 Festo showed its Bionic Handling Assistant, an air-powered arm modelled on an elephant's trunk, with eleven degrees of freedom and a gripper with adaptive fingers. At Harvard, George Whitesides' group worked with DARPA on robots made entirely of elastomeric polymers. In 2011 the group described in PNAS a five-inch, four-legged robot that wriggled under a pane of glass three quarters of an inch above the surface as air was pumped into its limbs. The same year the team built a starfish-shaped gripper that picked up a raw egg without breaking it, and a live mouse without harming it.

Festo's Bionic Handling Assistant, an air-driven arm modelled on an elephant's trunk, at Hannover Messe in April 2012. Photo: Ra Boe / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

Soft fingers on food lines and ABB FlexPickers

Soft Robotics was spun out of the Whitesides Group in 2013. Its grippers took their cue from an octopus's tentacle: fingers of flexible material such as silicone, powered by compressed air. A first public prototype followed in 2014, and late in 2015 the company began selling grippers that mount on industrial arms from makers like ABB. By 2017 about 80 percent of its business was food, from bakery to produce, helped by equipment that could simply be hosed down at the end of the day. ABB's venture arm, ABB Technology Ventures, took an equity stake, and ABB described itself as both a partner and an investor.

ABB FlexPicker robots with blue soft grippers move pastry balls from the belt into blister trays at Delicato near Stockholm. Photo: ABB

The two companies built food handling cells together. ABB Review describes one of the largest global pizza retailers, which ships fresh dough to its stores and had tried for two years to automate packing the soft dough balls. Soft Robotics built a solution in under a week, pairing its grippers with ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots. At Delicato, a pastry maker in Segeltorp south of Stockholm, four FlexPickers use ABB's PickMaster vision to pick pastry balls off the belt into blister packs, and staffing costs on that line fell by about 40 percent. The IRB 360 comes in versions from 1 to 8 kg, tracks fast belts through ABB's conveyor tracking module and has a stainless option validated to IP69K for wash-down with hot, high-pressure water.

A wash-down ABB FlexPicker sprayed with water, the kind of cleaning food lines need. Photo: ABB

The latest step is dexterity. In a study in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, announced on 2 October 2026, researchers at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and the Universidad Pública de Navarra (UPNA) presented a soft gripper whose three fingers each have three degrees of freedom: two tendon-driven bending motions and a rotation around the base. The flexible joints are 3D printed from NinjaFlex 85A TPU, and electric motors pull the tendons. By coordinating the fingers, the gripper rolls an object and reorients it without letting go, the way we turn a jar to read its label. In tests with 11 objects, from a rubber duck to a screwdriver, it held on in 54 of 55 grasps. The one failure was an artificial flower that slipped out.

The UC3M and UPNA soft gripper holding a ball with its three red tendon-driven fingers, then turning it. Photo: UC3M via EurekAlert (CC BY)

Where soft grippers go next: warehouse picking and tougher fingers

Soft Robotics itself has since left the gripper business. In August 2024 Schmalz, a vacuum technology company headquartered in Glatten, bought its flexible gripping product assets, and the company renamed itself Oxipital AI to focus on AI. In 2025 the two extended their partnership on automated picking. Electric soft grippers are on sale too. OnRobot's food-grade Soft Gripper uses three interchangeable silicone tools, handles up to 2.2 kg and needs no external air supply, and in 2020 OnRobot said its tool interface had been expanded to support ABB robots.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot over bags of cashew nuts at Dan D Pak in Vietnam, where it lifts them with a suction gripper. Photo: ABB

Soft Robotics also went after warehouse picking. ABB Review called bin picking, where a robot finds the right item in a mixed bin, grabs it and packs it, a classic problem in robotics, and the company built a version of its system called SuperPick for e-commerce and logistics. ABB's own Robotic Item Picker, launched in 2023, uses AI vision to choose grasp points and a suction gripper to lift cuboids, cylinders, pouches, polybags and blister packs, up to 1,400 items an hour on an IRB 1200, IRB 1300 or IRB 2600. Researchers also want soft grippers to feel what they hold. KAIST's BeetleBot, announced in mid-October 2026, closes a soft gripper with artificial muscles and checks the contact with a pressure sensor.

The suction gripper of ABB's Robotic Item Picker lifts an item out of a bin, guided by the camera beside it. Photo: ABB

In 2017 Vause named wear as the biggest challenge in taking soft grippers out of the lab, because factory robots run around the clock, "millions of cycles a month". Empire Robotics found this out. Its Versaball, a balloon filled with granular material, could not endure high-repetition industrial use, and the company went quiet in 2016. The Spanish team made its three fingers separately replaceable, so a broken one can be swapped without changing the whole gripper. For ABB users, a soft gripper on a GoFa cobot is one possibility. ABB says GoFa can share a workspace with people without fencing, and such a cell can be planned and tested first in RobotStudio.

An ABB GoFa cobot and a worker on the nut packing line at Dan D Pak in Binh Duong Province, Vietnam. Photo: ABB

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