An innovative robotic gripper for grasping and handling research

Abstract

A planar robotic gripper, suitable for research in grasping and handling of a wide variety of objects, has been developed in the Industrial Automation Laboratory of the University of British Columbia. The present design has two fingers, four links, and two actuators, but can be directly extended to more links while keeping the number of actuators unchanged. This robotic end effector exhibits two distinctive features. First, it utilizes fewer number of actuators than it has degrees of freedom, thus providing quantifiable savings in weight, size, complexity and cost. Second, it is capable of conforming to different shapes and sizes of object through autonomous, sequential switching of the actuator drives between links. The design, construction and research applications of the hand are described in this paper. Experiments with the robotic hand have exhibited close agreement with computer simulations.