Research on Additive Technique Parameter Optimization for Robotic Gripper Construction

Abstract

Designing an industrial robot gripper suitable for today’s industry is a challenging task due to the rapid evolution of products. Industrial robots are involved in machining, the transfer of parts, control and assembly, and the number of tasks performed by robots are increasing. Robots need to have the capability to adapt to new jobs consisting of new parts and new trajectories, and in most cases the preferred end effectors are grippers. In turn, grippers need to be flexible enough in order to cope with these changes. For this research, the authors propose a new gripper design which is capable of handling a large variety of parts with different sizes and shapes. In this research, an electrically actuated four-jaw gripper, with the capability of parallel movement of its jaws, is presented that also has the capability to fold the clamping jaws two by two and become a two-jaw gripper. Since the design is most suitable for additive manufacturing techniques, different additive techniques are analyzed for the manufacturing of the gripper. In the second part of the paper, different setups of the 3D printers are considered, such as infill percentage, raster angle and layer height. The main material on focus is a PET with grinded carbon-fiber reinforcement, but different materials are used for a better comparison of the rigidity of the system. This comparison is also presented in this article. The analysis of the material and 3D printing parameters are tested with Standard D638-14 probes used in a traction testing machine. After performing the traction test, the results are compared with FEA analysis. An optimal solution based on the experimental tests is proposed for the manufacture of the proposed gripper design.