Development of a multi-spiral gripper for leather industry

Deals with the gripping of soft, flat and deformable pieces, which is a usual task in textile manufacturing. In order to overcome the difficulties described in the paper, the authors propose to develop intelligent pneumatic-sucking grippers capable of performing on-line self-configuration. These low-cost devices comprise a basic element called the spiral module that permits one to move a sucker over a plane following an Archimedes´ spiral law. The information used to correctly position the suckers is obtained either from a vision system or from a CAD database. The gripper developed in this work is composed of identical spiral modules, and it is employed to grasp leather pieces in shoe manufacturing. Tests show that its performance and adaptability are largely satisfying.<>