Manipulation

Compliant Grasp

A compliant grasp is a grasp in which the gripper or hand yields elastically to conform to object geometry and accommodate pose uncertainty, achieved through soft materials, underactuated linkages, passive joints, or active force control. Mechanisms like the underactuated hands from the Harvard/Yale iRobot collaboration and soft grippers such as Festo's Fin Ray designs exploit compliance to grasp diverse objects without precise pre-grasp alignment.

Why it matters for physical AI

Grasp-level compliance converts centimeter-scale perception and policy errors into successful grasps, dramatically lowering the precision burden on learned grasping systems handling diverse, unmodeled objects.