Liquid Metal Universal Grippers for Ultra-Gentle, Highly-Adaptable, Multiscale, and Fast Manipulations

The ability to handle and manipulate objects is a fundamental skill across various organisms, from single-celled entities to humans. This capability has inspired the development of versatile robotic grippers for both industrial applications and everyday tasks ^1-4 . Despite that some robotic grippers can surpass humans in certain aspects ^5-7 , object manipulation still faces numerous challenges due to the diversity of target objects' shapes, materials (from soft to hard), sizes (from microscale to macroscale), and operational environments ^8-10 , especially for dynamic targets like living organisms ^11,12 . In the microbial world, the amoeba can flow like liquid to adaptively change its morphology to effectively capture and excrete various prey. Here, inspired by the unique hunting behavior of amoebas, we present a liquid metal universal gripper (LiMU gripper), which exhibits exceptional grasping and active releasing capabilities for targets of various shapes, sizes, and stiffnesses, both in liquid and air environments. Remarkably, the LiMU gripper achieves the world's lowest gripping contact pressure of ~10 Pa, making it ideal for handling delicate items such as mollusks. The LiMU gripper can capture and release moving objects within milliseconds without the need for precise alignment. Importantly, we unveil an active release mechanism that leverages the active control of liquid metal’s high surface tension, enabling the world's fastest release of micro-objects, with accelerations reaching up to 42 G. This allows the LiMU gripper to handle multiscale objects ranging from 10 ^-12 to 10 ² grams, spanning 14 orders of magnitude. The LiMU gripper offers significant advantages over existing robotic grippers in terms of adaptability, multiscale operation, low contact pressure, and fast manipulation speeds, presenting a new and practical solution to various unresolved manipulation challenges, particularly for living organisms and microscale objects.