Robotic gripper made of paper can grab both delicate and heavy things

A robotic gripper made from flexible ribbons can pick up objects as delicate as a dandelion to something 16,000 times heavier than itself.

Most robotic grippers are specialised to perform a narrow set of tasks, but performing well in one domain often entails a trade-off. A tool well suited to picking up heavy objects, for example, normally struggles to manipulate much lighter, intricate objects.

Jie Yin at North Carolina State University and his colleagues have developed a gripper that avoids much of …