A pivoting gripper for feeding industrial parts

To be cost effective and highly precise, many industrial assembly robots have only four degrees of freedom (DOF) plus a binary pneumatic gripper. Such robots commonly permit parts to be rotated only about a vertical axis. However it is often necessary to reorient parts about other axes prior to assembly. In this paper the authors describe a way to orient parts about an arbitrary axis by introducing a rotating bearing between the jaws of a simple gripper. Based on this mechanism, the authors are developing a rapidly configurable vision-based system for feeding parts. In this system, a camera determines initial part pose; the robot then reorients the part to achieve a desired final pose. The authors have implemented a prototype version in their laboratory using a commercially-available robot system