抄録
In the field of industrial robots, miniaturization of electric grippers used to pick and place workpieces is required. This study aimed at the development of the gripping mechanism that obtains a large opening/closing distance of the fingers with a small driving displacement utilizing the snap-through buckling phenomenon. In this study, a prototype of the gripper finger was made from a thin elastic plate. The elastic finger was modeled as a series of links connected with 2-DOF elastic joints, and the gripping operation simulation was performed based on the stationary potential energy using the Lagrange multiplier method for introducing the geometrical boundary conditions as constraints. From a result of the simulation, it was found that there is an optimal positional relationship between the fingertip and the gripped object to maximize the gripping force.
