Robot Grippers

Citation

(2009), "Robot Grippers", Assembly Automation, Vol. 29 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/aa.2009.03329aae.001

Robot Grippers

Article Type: Book review From: Assembly Automation, Volume 29, Issue 1

Gareth J. Monkman, Stefan Hesse, Ralf Steinmann and Henrik Schunk,Wiley-VCH,October 2006,€139,453 pp.,ISBN: 978-3-527-40619-7,

Grasping or gripping of parts is one of the challenges in automated assembly and material handling. This book tackles a wide range of gripper designs, gripper classification, and selection. Usually, gripper and end-effector issues are just a chapter in a robotic handbook. However, this book has 14 chapters dedicated to these issues:

1. 1.

   Introduction to prehension technology.

2. 2.

   Automatic prehension.

3. 3.

   Impactive mechanical grippers.

4. 4.

   Ingressive grippers.

5. 5.

   Astrictive prehension.

6. 6.

   Contigutive prehension.

7. 7.

   Miniature grippers and microgrippers.

8. 8.

   Special designs.

9. 9.

   Hand axes and kinematics.

10. 10.

    Separation.

11. 11.

    Instrumentation and control.

12. 12.

    Tool exchange and reconfigurability.

13. 13.

    Compliance.

14. 14.

    Selected case studies.

The book is a comprehensive, up-to-date treatment of robotic grippers. The book includes both traditional methods and many more recent developments, including contactless gripping. The application areas are also wide; mechanical part handling, flexible part handling, textile, optoelectronics, and so on.

In the beginning, some of the words used in the book were unfamiliar to me. I was used to grasping or gripping instead of prehension. The book uses terms such as impactive, ingressive, astrictive, and contigutive to describe gripper classifications, words I previously did not understand. These classifications are different from what I was used to, so Chapter 2 opened my eyes.

This book goes into great detail about forces, mating contacts, uses, and the operation of various gripper designs complete with an extensive set of mechanical, control, and other schematics that are easy to understand. On average, there is more than one figure per page, totalling more than 570 figures. The data tables are also very useful.

Chapter 7 deals with microgrippers and other forces than gravity matters. This is quite a new area and a lot of development is going on due to product miniaturisation. Special grippers, anthropomorphic grippers, jointed finger grippers, and dextrous hands are presented in Chapter 8. The rest of the book covers details of related topics such as: kinematics, part separation, sensors, tool exchange, multi-grippers, and compliance. The entire book is rounded-off with specific examples and case studies.

This book is the outcome of many years of research and robotic gripper development. It was originally published in German, and this English version is updated from the original.

I do believe that the formulas to calculate forces, schematics, figures, tables, and gripper selection guidelines are very useful, and thus valuable for engineers. The book is really a single source of information, a good reference for researchers, academics, developers, robotics users or production engineers, and it is also useful for others, e.g. those in service robotics.

If you are working with any aspect of robotics that deals with a gripper in some fashion, then this book will definitely help. I wish I had a similar book available while authoring and co-authoring the industrial gripper design handbook, or the end-effector chapter for the robotics handbook for the Finnish Industry, written more than ten years ago.

Juhani HeilalaVTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Finland