The ability to rapidly introduce new components for assembly is an important concept in agile manufacturing. An agile workcell should therefore minimize the amount of downtime spent on retooling the system whenever components are introduced. In order to reduce the changeover time, a means for automatically generating gripper designs based on part geometry would be highly desirable. Such grippers should ideally be capable of handling multiple parts, and should be insensitive to uncertainties in the part positions.

This research project seeks to accomplish these goals through the use of rapid prototyping technology.

Conceptual illustrations of rapidly prototyped gripper fingers

A multipurpose gripper, designed to grasp multiple hydraulic components. The fingers were fabricated using the CAM-LEM rapid prototyping system.

Here are some papers describing this work in greater detail. The papers are in a gzipped PostScript format.

• Computer-Assisted Gripper and Fixture Customization via Rapid Prototyping Technology, To appear in the Proceedings of the 1997 International Association of Science and Technology for Development (IASTED) Conference on Robotics and Manufacturing.
• Automated Gripper and Fixture Customization via Rapid Prototyping Technology, CAISR Technical Report TR-96-104, 16 September 1996. Submitted to the 1997 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
• An Approach to Automated Gripper Customization Using Rapid Prototyping Technology, CAISR Technical Report TR-96-101, 19 January 1996

Some related WWW sites

• ACIS solid modelling
• CMU Manipulation Lab Research Papers
• Agile Fixturing Project

This page has been visited times since 11 June 1996.

E-mail: rdq@po.cwru.edu

Last update: 15 January 1997