Design and Test of Object Aligning Grippers for Industrial Applications

In this paper we present a new concept for gripping objects in industrial applications. We assume that a priori, the object pose is only known with a relative low accuracy. Despite this, our method can lead to high accuracy gripping suitable for e.g. industrial assembly. Our concept is to augment a simple parallel gripper by mounting a set of object specific jaws. Given the right shapes these jaws enable the gripper to automatically align the object, and thereby compensate for errors in the original object pose estimation. We introduce a couple of automatic and semi-automatic design strategies for deriving these shapes and describe how these can be verified by simulations using rigid body dynamics. The output of our system is a CAD model for the jaws. We prove our concept with a number of experiments, which are also used to verify the coherence between the simulation and real world