In several industries, including automotive, aircraft, camera and photocopier manufacturing, a large number of complex shaped 3D sheet metal (and sheet plastic) parts are joined to make frames and bodies. A robotic gripper suitable for this task has four requirements:
- part pickup
- rigid part locating
- accurate part locating
- ability to grasp a wide range of shapes.
We have developed three robotic servo grippers that meet these requirements and can grasp a wide variety of parts. The grippers feature a novel finger design that allows them to accurately and rigidly locate the parts in the presence of initial robot and part positioning errors. Tests have been performed with gripper prototypes on several automotive parts. The standard deviation of the parts position was reduced to 0.05 mm after grasping, from 0.4 mm prior to grasping.