  Robotics hand/grippers nowadays are not limited to manufacturing lines;
instead, they are widely utilized in cluttered environments, such as
restaurants, farms, and warehouses. In such scenarios, they need to deal with
high uncertainty of the grasped objects' shapes, postures, surfaces, and
material properties, which requires complex integration of sensing and
decision-making process. On the other hand, integrating soft materials into the
gripper's design may tolerate the above uncertainties and reduce complexity in
control. In this paper, we introduce ROSE, a novel soft gripper that can
embrace the object and squeeze it by buckling a funnel-liked thin-walled soft
membrane around the object by simple rotation of the base. Thanks to this
design, ROSE hand can adapt to a wide range of objects that can fit in the
funnel and handle with gentle gripping force. Regardless of this, ROSE can
generate a high lift force (up to 33kgf) while significantly reducing the
normal pressure on the gripped objects. In our experiment, a 198g ROSE can be
integrated into a robot arm with a single actuation and successfully lift
various types of objects, even after 400,000 trials. The embracing mechanism
helps reduce the dependence of friction between the object and the membrane, as
ROSE could pick up a chicken egg submerged inside an olive oil tank. We also
report a feasible design for equipping the ROSE hand with tactile sensing while
appealing to the scalability of the design to fit a wide range of objects.
Video: https://youtu.be/E1wAI09LaoY
