Photo: Festo For example, dairy farming is a labor-intensive agricultural business with low margins and a shortage of workers. Here the soft fingers are gripping a chocolate egg without breaking the delicate confection. The novel adaptive gripper is based on the design of a fish’s tail fin. The collaborative segment is driving interest in adaptive grasping, but just as important are other industries driving development where the scarcity or cost of labor, the need for greater flexibility and speed, and small lot sizes are stimulating interest in automated solutions. They would be correct, but only partially. Mention adaptive grippers to anyone in manufacturing or assembly today, and likely their first response will be to say adaptive grippers are being developed for collaborative robotics. During the next 10 years, the most exciting advancements in grasping would be adaptive. One Festo design, a biomimicry-based gripper derived from a fish’s tail fin configuration, featured soft “fish-fin” gripper fingers that gently wrapped around and adapted to different shapes. Just about a decade ago, a new class of adaptive grippers was on the horizon. Fully open radial fingers can rest just above or below the workpiece and close when positioned. The angled gripper variation is the radial gripper: The fingers open a full 180˚, useful where vertical space is limited. The three fingers slide the workpiece to the gripper’s center, holding the workpiece snugly. Three-finger grippers are used to center the workpiece between the fingers, which are offset by various angles. Parallel grippers, the most frequently applied, do just what their name implies - two slides either close parallel to the workpiece to grip its outside edges or open out to put pressure on inside walls. A decade ago, the three most common types of industrial grippers were parallel, three-finger, and angled.
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