Functional Design of a Robotic Gripper for Adaptive Robotic Assembly

Nowadays, automated production systems are rapidly changing to increase flexibility. However, robot end effectors are usually designed to accomplish specific tasks and to handle a limited family of parts, and flexibility can only be obtained by using tool changing systems. The main drawbacks of such systems are increased cost of automation and reduced productivity. This paper presents the functional design of a flexible robotic gripper, capable of adaptively changing its aperture (grasp width) to different handling demands, without affecting the cycle time of the production system, as it can be actuated in hidden time. The solution proposed consists of (1) an electrically-actuated mechanism for adapting aperture, which allows to satisfy the flexibility requirements; (2) a pneumatically-actuated mechanism for open/close operations, which ensures comparably fast motion of jaws if compared to traditional, non-adaptive robotic grippers.