An Automated Design Approach for Task-Specific two Finger Grippers for Industrial Applications

Automatization is a central goal in the context of industry 4.0 to ensure the international competitiveness of whole economic sectors. In the production industry the handling of products is an important task thereby. With the ongoing trend towards individualization of products, more and more individual grippers are necessary to meet the high requirements towards the fulfilling of handling tasks. Additive manufacturing describes the layer wise step by step generation of individual parts and enables a possibility for a cheap and quick generation of individual parts. Thus, it's the perfect technology to generate individual and task- specific optimized grippers. Extrusion-based processes thereby not only allow high performant polymer materials, but also multi material combination in a part to realize resilient hard soft transitions.At the moment the time consumptive part in the realization of individual grippers is not in the fabrication anymore, but in the design phase. In this paper an automated design process for individual two finger grippers for the fabrication with additive manufacturing is proposed. The input information for the algorithm is given by a boundary representation of the object to be grasped and the desired gripping forces. A standard servo motor is used as drive and automatically selected from da database to fit to the task specifications. The linear motion of the gripper jaws is realized by a gear rack transmission. The gripper jaws are adapted to the handling object to allow a form closure grasp and an approach is proposed to reduce gripping forces by a compliant structure. A first prototype is presented, showing the concept. Experiments are performed to characterize the fabrication technology and the resulting gripper forces.