High Reconfigurable Robotic Gripper for Flexible Assembly

This paper describes a general purpose gripper to be used into industrial manufacturing application. The gripper has been developed in the context of the AUTORECON project. It is based on a 2 degrees of freedom finger that is able to adapt itself to objects of various shape, size, material and weight. Thanks to its highly reconfigurable and adaptive capabilities, the gripper described here is an attempt to create a gripper suitable in industrial application to assemble compounds of several different workpieces using only one robot. The high dexterity and the wide range of possible uses of the gripper described here intends to explore a new approach to the design of industrial grippers to be used in factory automation. Moreover, the adaptive capabilities of this gripper make it suitable to grasp workpieces with complicated geometry or highly irregular shape, as it has been proved in performed automotive test rig described here.