Design of a self-adaptive gripper with rigid fingers for Industrial Internet

Abstract

Grippers are widely used in Industrial Internet for facilitating various operations such as logistics, materials handling, assembly, etc. Current grippers are specifically designed for a specific application so that it is difficult to adapt to a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Soft grippers have been developed to grasp objects with high surface complexity in Industrial Internet. Some challenges such as low controllability and long response time still exist. Rigid robot gripper shows good characters like robustness, accuracy and short response time. This paper thus presents a robot self-adaptive gripper using rigid fingers, where four rigid fingers are connected by springs that are tied to a screw rod. The screw rod is actuated by a rotary motor. Tip force of the fingers could be precisely controlled by the linear movement of the screw rod. The shapes and sizes of the object could be adaptively grasped due to the elasticity of the connecting springs. The proposed gripper is tested and verified to be highly flexible and controllable so that it could be suitable for most of the applications in production systems in the context of Industrial Internet.