Three function robotic gripper driven by a single motor for grasping in narrow spaces

Abstract

This paper proposes the novel robotic gripper that realizes the three functional operations: grasping object, rotating object, and pull-in object. The developed gripper achieves these functions by a single motor. The main target task of the developed gripper is grasping objects in narrow spaces, such as the picking up object from a box in a shelf. To achieves three functions, the gripper adopted two self-motion switching mechanisms. One is for switching the gripper behavior automatically between the grasping and rotating object modes according to the fingertip posture. Another switches the gripper behavior between the grasping and pull-in modes according to the grasping force applied to the fingertip. This study proposes the structure of the griper and evaluated the gripper experimentally.