SenRobGrip

Sensitive Robot based Gripping – SenRobGrip

This project is funded by the European Union and the State of North Rhine-Westphalia through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Solutions are commercially available for the force- and moment-sensitive handling of objects which are almost exclusively limited to the phases of object pickup and storage. Direct gripping forces, collisions with the environment, and other force/moment related parameters can be detected with today’s technology. The dynamic behavior of an object in the gripper and the control over it has not been the subject of industrial applications, although it could offer significant benefits for cycle time reduction and process safety, for example. In particular, there is great potential for improvements in motion planning based on the resulting conservative interpretation of the motion process. This is what this project addresses.

The intelligent gripper offers detection and provision of the currently applied forces and moments (in other words, force actually acting on the product) in each phase of the handling process through the implemented CPPS capabilities and thus for the first time the opportunity to react to these force and torque values directly in the process because of the real-time feedback to the motion control of the robot which has been integrated as well. The monitoring and control of the object behavior or motion process of a robot will have a positive effect on a wide variety of factors of the handling process, such as on the reduction of gripping errors or better use of the investment potential. A central component of the development will be the sensory component and its integration into the system, which enables the exact localization of an object in the gripper and the determination of its force/torque-related behavior.

SenRobGrip is a collaborative project of the Chair of Production Engineering of the Ruhr-University Bochum, IBG Robotronic GmbH, and IBG Automation GmbH.

Read more at SenRobGrip.de