With Touch And Help Features Of The New Pneumatic Gripper

Pneumatic gripper, which has characteristics of small size, light weight, fast action and simple operation, is widely used in automatic production line. However, it sometimes occurs that the workpiece fails to be caught up by the gripper or slides down from the gripper during transmission process, which will lead to chaos of the working procedure and even cause unexpected accidents. Therefore, it is of significant meanings and practical application value to develop a new-type pneumatic gripper, which has tactility function to detect whether the workpiece has been caught up and gripping aided function to provide assistant holding force.The main research efforts in this paper are concluded as follows: (1) The structure of the new-type pneumatic gripper and its working pneumatic circuit are designed on the basis of functional analyses and implementing scheme researches. (2) According to the fundament of pneumatic detecting and the theory of pneumatic transmission, a mathematic model that reflects the dynamic performance of the tactility part is built. Based on the mathematic model, dynamic simulation is conducted in the Matlab-Simulink environment, and the simulation results can be seen in real time. (3) A prototype of the new-type pneumatic gripper is developed, and a series of experiments have been carried out to test the response time of the tactility part, the absorptive force and the whole performance of the new-type pneumatic gripper.The research results indicate that the new-type pneumatic gripper can rapidly and accurately perceive whether the workpiece has been caught up (with response time less than 10ms), and that a certain absorptive force will be rapidly generated between the surface of the workpiece and the surface of the gripper after the workpiece is caught up.The technology and method proposed in this paper can be referenced by the enterprise to develop new-type pneumatic gripper products with tactility and gripping-aided function.