  One of the trendsetting themes in soft robotics has been the goal of
developing the ultimate universal soft robotic gripper. One that is capable of
manipulating items of various shapes, sizes, thicknesses, textures, and
weights. All the while still being lightweight and scalable in order to adapt
to use cases. In this work, we report a soft gripper that enables delicate and
precise grasps of fragile, deformable, and flexible objects but also excels in
lifting heavy objects of up to 1617x its own body weight. The principle behind
the soft gripper is based on extending the capabilities of electroadhesion soft
grippers through the enhancement principles found in metamaterial adhesion cut
and patterning. This design amplifies the adhesion and grasping payload in one
direction while reducing the adhesion capabilities in the other direction. This
counteracts the residual forces during peeling (a common problem with
electroadhesive grippers), thus increasing its speed of release. In essence, we
are able to tune the maximum strength and peeling speed, beyond the
capabilities of previous electroadhesive grippers. We study the capabilities of
the system through a wide range of experiments with single and
multiple-fingered peel tests. We also demonstrate its modular and adaptive
capabilities in the real-world with a two-finger gripper, by performing
grasping tests of up to $5$ different multi-surfaced objects.
