Project Link:
https://academy.3ds.com/en/projects/hybrid-grasping-and-suction-end-effector

Project Overview:

Robotic end-effectors are increasingly being deployed within industrial settings to automate mundane and repetitive tasks away from human labour. Leading industry’s adoption has been the use of bespoke end-effectors designed for specific tasks in reproducible environments, but work remains on creating end-effectors suited for more general-purpose tasking. Few attempts synergise both suction and fingered grasping into a single design. Of the few existing attempts made all conclude further optimisation is likely to prove successful in creating a general-purpose end-effector.

This project has consequently seen the identification and design of five features of an end-effector that uses both suction and fingered grasping, optimised for general-purpose tasking. The proposed design uses tendon actuation to provide both individual and underactuated fingered grasping and mechanically self-sealing suction cups. A linearly actuated planetary gearing mechanism is designed into the palm of the end-effector allowing rotation of two of the three fingers to accommodate a wider range of grasps. Finally, a novel fingertip mechanism is also devised to adapt to the contours of geometrically complex objects.

The resulting design is expected to validate the hybrid approach through deployment in an idealised bin-picking scenario. Unfortunately due to the COVID-19 lockdown, fabrication of the device was not complete (see last photo) and testing could not be performed. Nevertheless, should this be succesful the design will pioneer a new category of end-effector that can outperform existing single technology end-effector designs, and hence accelerate the automation of general-purpose tasking.

My Background:
I'm a Mechanical Engineering student with a strong interest in robotics and likes to experiment with both hardware and software!

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