Design and Development of a Robot Gripper for Flexible Grasping and Orienting of the Objects

Abstract

Industrial robots are mainly used at the manufacturing companies for the operations like assembly, machine loading, part transfer, palletizing and storing. Also in light scale industries such as electronics, packaging and pharmacy, there are a lot of circumstances where pick and place operations are required for manipulating, inspecting and sorting of the products. All these operation requires both grasping and reorientation of objects during the manipulation tasks and normally handles cylindrical objects. In order to examine the above problems, a simple two finger gripper can be designed which can perform both grasping and reorienting of parts by avoiding the use of separate part feeders. The concept of flexible grasping can also be incorporated in the above design to produce highly stable grasping during the manipulation of objects.
In reference to the aforementioned needs, a novel two finger flexible gripper is designed and developed which is able to reorient a cylindrical object from horizontal position to vertical position and then grasp the object at that new upright position. The gripper mainly consist of small hemispherical point contact fixed to an elastic strip mounted over a V-groove cavity. First, the gripper grasp the object with point contact on the elastic strip, then reorient it with low gripping force until the object reaches the vertical position. After the object gets reoriented, gripping force increases to position the object into the V-groove cavity and produces a stable grasping with the help of elastic strip. This design can only be used with parallel gripper and can be reconfigured to grasp different shape of object by changing the geometry of the cavity.