Passive Sensing Jaw for Grasping and Orienting

The goal of this work is to present an innovative design for a smart robotic gripper, which is able to grasp different randomly deployed prismatic and cylindrical packages and orient them through a mechanically passive alignment system with sensing capability. It consists in a new concept of end-effector combined with an ad-hoc path planning for aligning residual worst cases. The system uses gravity and an angular sensor embedded into the gripper to detect the object orientation and, if necessary, formulate a control strategy to align it before the release phase. An initial screening experiment was executed to find the parameters that most influence the alignment angle and execution time. Two worst-case pack ages were tested in different working conditions. The results show that the percentage of success of the system is high even in the worst operating conditions.