Design of a two-degree-of-freedom gripper for parallel manipulators

Abstract

Parallel manipulators are closed-loop mechanisms presenting superior performance compared to serial manipulators in terms of speed, accuracy, precision, and rigidity. They have become widely popular in the industry in the last two decades. Although parallel manipulators are fast enough for most industrial operations, sometimes they cannot catch up with the speed of objects on the conveyor thereby missing some pieces. Considering randomly arriving objects on a conveyor, this task becomes even more challenging. In this study, a two-degree-of-freedom gripper for parallel manipulators is developed in order to overcome this di culty. First of all, design details of the gripper are presented. Second, preliminary analyses are performed using a three axis Delta-type manipulator for a typical pick-and-place task. Third, the developed gripper is integrated into the same manipulator and tested for certain performance criteria. The analysis and measurement results show that the manipulator performs a given task with reduced cycle time and energy consumption when integrated with the proposed gripper rather than a conventional one.