Industrial robots become useless without end-effectors that for many instances are in the form of friction grippers. Commonly friction grippers apply frictional forces to different objects on the basis of programmers’ experiences. This puts a limitation on the effectiveness of gripping force that may result in damaging the object. This paper describes various stages of design and development of...

A robotic cell−a manufacturing system widely used in industry−contains two or more robot-served machines, repetitively producing a number of part types. In this paper, we consider scheduling of operations in a bufferless dual gripper robotic cell processing multiple part types. The processing constraints specify the cell to be a flowshop. The objective is to determine the robot move sequence an...

This paper is concerned with the determination of optimum forces extracted by robot grippers on the surface of a grasped rigid object – a matter which is crucial to guarantee the stability of the grip without causing defect or damage to the grasped object. A multicriteria optimization of robot gripper design problem is solved with two different configurations involving two conflicting objective...

This paper presents the mechanical design, analysis, fabrication, and testing procedures of a new large-range microgripper which is based on a flexible hinge structure. The uniqueness of the gripper is that the gripper arms not only provide large gripping range but also deliver approximately rectilinear movement as the displacement in nonworking direction is extremely small. The large gripping ...

We use psychophysics to investigate human-centered transparency of grasping in unilateral robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS) without force feedback. Instead of the classical definition of transparency, we define here a human-centered transparency, focusing on natural action and perception in RAMIS. Demonstrating this approach, we assess the effect of gripper scaling on human-cent...

This project deals with the modelling, control and simulation of a micro electro-mechanical actuator for micromechatronical tweezers in DNA-manipulation processes. I. THE MICRO-MECHATRONICAL PROCESS The manipulation of biological molecules by using micromechanical and optical devices such as: magnetic tweezers [1], [2], optical tweezers [3], AFM cantilevers [4] and microfibers [5], [6], are now...

Self-peeling of gecko toes is mimicked by integration of film-terminated fibrillar adhesives to hybrid nematic liquid crystal network (LCN) cantilevers. A soft gripper is developed based on the gecko-inspired attachment/detachment mechanism. Performance of the fabricated gripper for transportation of thin delicate objects is evaluated by the optimum mechanical strength of the LCN and the maximu...

VISION SYSTEM, produced by Newton Research Labs. The authors embedded the vision system in a small robot base to tie for first place in the Clean Up the Tennis Court event at the 1996 Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Of particular interest is that the authors’ entry was the only robot capable of u...

The small scale of microsurgery poses significant challenges for developing robust and dexterous tools to grip, cut, and join sub-millimeter structures such as vessels and nerves. The main limitation is that traditional manufacturing techniques are not optimized to create smart, articulating structures in the 0.1 – 10 mm scale. Pop-up book MEMS is a new fabrication technology that promises to o...