Design and analysis of a reconfigurable robotic gripper for limp material handling

Abstract

Discusses the design and modeling fundamentals of a multiple degree of freedom reconfigurable robotic gripper system (RGS), designed to reliably automate the process of limp material handling without causing distortion, deformation and/or folding. The reconfigurable gripper design draws upon the authors' (2000) previously reported work on the flat surfaced, fixed-dimensions gripper system. The design of the reconfigurable gripper system consists of four arms in a cross-bar configuration, with a flat surfaced, fixed dimensions, suction based gripper unit mounted on each of the arms. In the paper, the kinematic and dynamic performances of the reconfigurable robotic gripper system are analyzed and then validated using 1-DEAS software.