In scientific research, industrial production and daily life, it is often necessary to use hand claws to grasp, manipulate and assemble objects. Grasping and manipulating objects is a basic but challenging task of mechanical systems, because the size, shape and quantity of these objects are different from macro scale to micro-nano scale. Sometimes there are even some special requirements, such as grabbing a large number of components at one time when picking up goods, and selectively releasing some components when printing, which is difficult to achieve with a general method.

Based on the shape memory polymer, the research group of Professor Song Jizhou of Zhejiang University proposed a universal gripper suitable for multi-scale objects with arbitrary shapes from 1um to1m. The clip is a simple shape memory polymer block, which can be easily scaled to handle objects of different sizes.