A robotic gripper for picking up two objects simultaneously

Industrial robots are commonly used in a large number of applications because they present superior performance in terms of accuracy, precision, rigidity, and most importantly speed. Although they are fast enough for pick and place operations, sometimes they cannot catch up with the speed of objects on the conveyor thereby missing some pieces. Considering randomly arriving objects on a conveyor, this task becomes even more challenging. In this study, a two-degree-of-freedom gripper for industrial manipulators is developed in order to overcome this difficulty. First of all, design details of the gripper are presented. Second, preliminary analyses are performed using a three axis Delta-type manipulator for a typical pick-and-place task. Third, the developed gripper is integrated into the same manipulator and tested for certain performance criteria. The analysis and measurement results show that the manipulator performs a given task with reduced cycle time and energy consumption when integrated with the proposed gripper rather than a conventional one. (c) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.