Fast finger design automation for industrial robots

Abstract

Finger design automation is highly demanded from robot industries to fulfill the requirements of the agile market. Nevertheless, literature lacks a promising approach to automate the design process of reliable fingers for industrial robots. Hence, this work proposes the generic optimized finger design (GOFD) method which automates the design process of single- and multi-function finger grippers. The proposed method includes an optimization algorithm to minimize the design process time. The method is utilized to generate fingers for several groups of objects. Results show that the GOFD method outperforms existing methods and is able to reduce the design time by an average of 16,600 s. While the proposed method substantially reduces the design process time of fingers, the quality of grasps is comparable to the traditional exhaustive search method. The grasp quality of GOFD deviates only 0.47% from the absolute best grasp known from the exhaustive search method in average. The designed fingers are lastly manufactured and experimentally verified.