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Design of an industrial robotic gripper for precise twisting and positioning in

high-speed assembly

Conference Paper · December 2013

DOI: 10.1109/SII.2013.6776733

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Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/SICE International MA1-J.3
Symposium on System Integration, Kobe International
Conference Center, Kobe, Japan, December 15-17,

Design of an Industrial Robotic Gripper for

Precise Twisting and Positioning in High-Speed Assembly
Ferdinando Cannella, Member, IEEE, Fei Chen, Member, IEEE, Carlo Canali,
Amit Eytan, Aldo Bottero and Darwin Caldwell, Fellow, IEEE

Abstract— In electronic manufacturing system, the design of

the robotic hand is important for the successful accomplishment
of the assembly task. Due to the restriction of the architecture
of traditional robotic hands, it is difficult to grasp the cylinder
shaped assembly parts with correct posture. In this research,
a novel 4-DOF jaw like gripper is designed and built for
precise positioning and twisting online. It can apply a constant
gripping force on assembly parts and perform reliable twisting
movement. Manipulating a cylinder shaped assembly part by
robot, as an experimental case in this paper, is studied to
evaluate the performance. The effectiveness of proposed gripper
design and mechanical analysis is proved by the experiments.

I. INTRODUCTION
During the past tens of year development in manufacturing
industry, this area has been divided into three main streams:
Massive Production, Medium Production and Small produc-
tion. In small production, usually full with robots, cannot
keep step with the growing social demanding for High-
Mix, Low-Volume manufacturing. For the manufacturing
fully with human workers, the labor cost is also increasing,
and so that production system has to face the growing
cost pressure in future. When addressing this problem, it
will be more useful and beneficial to make efforts in the
cooperation and coordination between them, consider their
trade-off and improve the overall assembly effectiveness
and efficiency. It can also provide the factory with certain
sufficient flexibility in production, guaranteeing the quality
and meanwhile reducing the cost.
Currently in robotic assembly cell for small production,
there still remain many shortcomings for robots. The first
one is that the robot cannot work efficiently in dealing with
assembly parts with complicated shapes. They often rely
on external sensor systems to help with the assembly work
[1]. The second one is because of the existence of human
workers. In future, for small production, to hire skilled
human workers to work with robots is the trend [2] [3] [4]. In
this case, the conventional gripper should be able to perform
complicated movement like human workers.
In order to achieve this goal, it is important to improve
the capability of robots, mainly robotic manipulators, within
the assembly cell. During the past years of development in
Ferdinando Cannella, Fei Chen, Carlo Canali, Darwin Caldwell are
within the Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tec-
nologia, Italy, 16163, e-mail: {ferdinando.cannella, fei.chen, Carlo.canali,
darwin.caldwell}@iit.it.
Amit Eytan is within the Centro Ricerche Fiat S.C.p.A, Turin, Italy,
10043, e-mail: amitaharon.eytan@crf.it.
Aldo Bottero is within the Comau Robotics, Turin, Italy, 10043, e-mail:
aldo.bottero@comau.com
Fig. 1. Assembly scenario in manufacturing automation in this research.
robotic manipulators, nevertheless, the basic appearance of
the manipulator has seldom changed, and it is also difficult
on the other hand to change the basic architecture of robots.
Therefore, another method to improve the capacity of robot
is to design various functional end-effectors for robots.
Lots of researchers have already paid much attention to
develop various functional end-effectors to extend the ability
of robots in the past 25 years. In robotics, an end effector is
the device at the end of a robotic arm, designed to interact
with the environment. End effector usually consists of a
robotic hand or a tool. It is widely used in automobile
industry, food packing [5], wafer production, aeronautics,
nuclear industry, and so on. The function of the hand is to
grasp and manipulate the objects during the assembly cycle.
A hand module has two parts: a gripper functional hardware
and jaws. The jaw part can be of two fingers [6] [5] [7] [8],
three fingers [9] or even four fingers [10] or more [11]. As
a main part of the end-effector, the robotic hand has been
playing an important part to realize the various function of
end-effector.
From previous research, grippers, main part of the robotic
hand, are categorized in four groups: Impactive, Ingres-
sive, Astrictive and Contigutive. The majority of industrial
grippers are either impactive, or of astrictive. However, the
function of the gripper decides its shape design, and therefore
the shape of the grippers varies. Exclude the mechanical
improvement of the robotic gripper, the current development
of robotic gripper is in two directions: one is to improve the
mechanical design or equip with sensor systems to provide
itself with a second function [12] [13] [14] [15], and the
second is to increase its similarities with human beings’

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 hands [16] [17].
For the first direction, in [18], a gripper equipped with a
vision sensor is designed and applied in the needle procedure.
In [19], the gripper is implemented with a small-sized tactile
array sensor to evaluate the approximate planar area of
the grasped object along with its shape online. The sensor
can also be used to measure the gripping force to help
the robot sustain a stable grasp of the object. In [14], a
novel universal grippers is developed, which is able to pick
up unfamiliar objects of widely varying shape and surface
properties. Different with traditional grippers, the individual
fingers are replaced by a single mass of granular material
that, when pressed onto a target object, flows around it and
conforms to its shape. Upon application of a vacuum the
granular material contracts and hardens quickly to pinch and
hold the object without requiring sensory feedback.
For the second direction, to make human hand like robotic
hand is always attracting the interest of researchers. In fact,
the original start point of robotic gripper is aimed to realize
the multiple functions of human being’s hand, such as tip
grip, three finger grip, cylindrical hollow grip, tong grip,
hook grip, hand palm grip and so on [20]. BarrettHand
[21] is one of the most successful commercial multi-fingered
programmable grippers, which is with the dexterity to secure
target objects of different sizes, shapes, and orientations.
Although various grippers are designed and built, but
seldom effort has been made within the electronic manufac-
turing industry. During the past few years, the shape of the
gripper used in this area has never been changed so much.
In electronic manufacturing industry, the assembly parts are
usually well shaped rigid ones, and therefore, the tong like
parallel jaw like gripper is widely adopted. However, there
still remain many limits for current grippers. In electronic
manufacturing, there is a large number of assembly parts with
cylinder shape (Fig. 2). If they are not fixed to some position,
but just naturally lie on the conveyor, there could be lots of
possible postures. The robotic manipulator has to carefully
exam the assembly parts with the help of sensor system,
and choose an appropriate gesture to pick it up. However,
this method is straight but not effective. It usually cost the
gripper a lot of time to find this gesture.
In order to realize these three basic functions for the
grippers used in the electronic manufacturing environments,
we develop a novel 4-DOF gripper for precise positioning
and twisting (TP gripper). The advantages of this TP grip-
per, compared with traditional robotic gripper, it can apply
constant gripping force on cylinder shaped assembly parts
with various surface material (Table I)and perform twisting
movement. Therefore, it can guarantee both effectiveness and
dexterity, which can be proved by the experimental data. It
helps the robot better accomplishing the assembly task with
higher speed and more accurate movement.
This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, after a
brief introduction of the design requirements and assump-
tions, mechanical and sensor system design for TP gripper
are discussed. In Section III, the kinematics study is carried
out. In Section IV, we carry out the simulation according to
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Fig. 2. A category of assembly parts
TABLE I
A SSEMBLY PARTS CATEGORY
Category External Appearance Surface Material Feature
1 Straight Metal Rigid
1 Irregular Rubber Deformable
1 Straight Rubber Rigid
1 Bending Rubber Deformable
the mechanical analysis, and test the gripper under practical
industrial environment. Conclusions and future works are
presented in Section V.
II. M ECHANICAL D ESIGN
A. Problem, Requirements and Assumptions
Manufacturing industry can be divided into three main
streams: Massive Production, Medium Production and Small
production. Because small production has to keep step with
the growing social demanding for High-Mix, Low-Volume
manufacturing, it has to adopt various robotic manipulators
with different end-effectors to carry out different assembly
tasks. A typical small production shown in Fig. 1 can be
divided into three parts: 1) Feeding system. It is usually
constructed by conveyors. 2) Robotic manipulators. The
key point for this part is to design various functional end-
effectors, or grippers. 3) The assembly zone. The basic
assembly action is: picking, fixing, placing, mating, and so
on.
The basic assumption in this research is that the general
shape of the assembly parts is cylinder, and with different
surface materials. Usually when this kind of assembly parts
lie on the conveyor, there could be several possible postures.
However, due to the design of the assembly system (Fig.
1), only limited number of postures are fitting for correctly
assembly. If the posture is already fit enough, what leaves
for the gripper is just to grasp it and perform the predesigned
assembly action. If the posture is not fit, there remains some
possible solutions, 1) change the posture of the assembly
parts before they are grasped by the manipulator, or 2) adjust
the posture of the assembly parts after they are grasped.
There are a lot of related researches about how to estimate
the posture of the assembly parts related with the first
solution by using some specific sensor system and then
robotic manipulator grasp them from appropriate direction.
Or, special machines are designed to change the posture of
the assembly parts with external force. But seldom of them
have ever considered adjusting the posture of the gripper
 Fig. 3. Architecture of TP gripper.

online using the second solution due to some technical

difficulties. The second solution is very adaptive and reliable,
and it can cope with more situations than the first solution.
Inspired by human being’s hands, it is better the traditional
parallel jaw like gripper can do twist action. It is easier to
do so if a complete human hands like robotic hand is built.
But for conventional gripper, it is difficult to make it twist
the stem of the glass like human do in his fingers. Therefore,
to design a robotic gripper not only reserve the simplicity of
jaw like gripper but also keep some feature like dexterous
manipulation, is of great importance.

B. TP Gripper Mechanical Design

In this paper, we design a robotic gripper for positioning
and twisting to meet the requirement described in the last
section. The architecture of this TP gripper is shown in Fig.
3. From the general view shown in Fig. 3, it consists of two
independent sub-grippers. A TP gripper is driven by four
motors. Compare with the convential gripper, this 4-DOF
TP gripper can not only do open and close for positioning,
but also do twisting for effective assemble cylinder shaped
parts as shown in Fig. 2.
The function of these motors are shown in Table II. With
the help of DC motor 1, this TP gripper is suitable for almost
every diameter of the cylinder shaped electronic assembly
parts. DC motor 2 can guarantee a constant gripping force
applied on the assembly parts. It provides sufficient friction
force with which the cylinder assembly parts can be twisted
by two inner gripper fingers. Both of the linear motors drive
the inner finger move with independent velocity. In this case,
the rotation angle can be precisely controlled by these inner
Fig. 4. Basic movement of TP gripper (a) Pick, (b) Grip, (c) Twist, (d)
Twist.
fingers.
A twisting action refers to the action that the human grasps
an object in hand and adjust its posture by twisting the
fingers. It is difficult to apply this technology on hand shape
like robotic hands, but it is relatively easier to make a jaw
shape like robotic gripper to do so only if it is equipped with
additional movement freedom. One key issue in designing
such a gripper is how to guarantee a constant and reliable
twisting movement by the two fingers without dropping the
gripped assembly parts.
III. K INEMATICS A NALYSIS
In order to check the performance of designed gripper, it
is significant to study its kinematics. As shown in Fig. 6, the

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 TABLE II
F UNCTION OF D IFFERENT PARTS W ITHIN TP G RIPPER S HOWN IN F IG . 3

Motor Function
DC Motor 1 Control the distance between two outer grippers
DC Motor 2 Control the stable contact on assembly parts between two inner grippers
Linear DC Motor 1 Control the twisting movement in vertical direction
Linear DC Motor 2 Control the twisting movement in vertical direction

Fig. 5. Kinematic schema of the TP gripper. The first four bar link (pink solid line) deals with vertical movement of the point F that is the gripper
fingertip. The rotation of the fingertip is given by the second four bar link (green solid line). The center of the motor can be considered coincident. The
arrows (semi-transparent) represent the vectors for position analysis. In letter in caps are the joints, in bold the vectors and in Greek the angles.

finger structure is the composition of two four-bar-linkages From equation. 2, we can get,
like: the first one moves, thorough the point D1 , the point
C2 of the second one. Thus the analytical solution is to find b21 = a21 cos2 α1 + c21 cos2 γ1 + C12 cos2 δ1
out point position D1 (also same with C2 ) and displacement + 2a1 c1 cos α1 cos γ1 − 2a1 C1 cos α1 cos δ1
F.
− 2c1 C1 cos γ1 cos δ1 + a21 sin2 α1 + c21 sin2 γ1
+ C12 sin2 δ1 − 2a1 c1 sin α1 sin γ1 − 2a1 C1 sin α1 sin δ1
+ 2c1 C1 sin γ1 sin δ1
A. D1 Determination (3)
because we have the following relationship,
For determining D1 position, it is necessary to compute
γ1 . This parameter can be calculated by applying vector P1 sin γ1 + P2 cos γ1 = P3 (4)
analysis to the first four-bar-linkage, as shown in semi-
transparent light green in Fig. 6. So, we have P1 , P2 , P3 are calculated by,

P1 = 2c1 (a1 sin α1 − C1 sin δ1 )


−
→ −
→ → − →
a1 + b 1 + −

c1 + C1 = 0

(1)  P = 2c (a cos α − C cos δ )

2 1 1 1 1 1
2 2 2 2 (5)
P
 3

 = b1 − a 1 − c 1 − C 1 + 2a1 C1 cos α1 cos δ1
It is expended into + 2a1 C1 sin α1 sin δ1


( then γ1 is determined by
a1 cos α1 + b1 cos β1 + c1 cos(−γ1 ) + C1 cos(−δ1 ) = 0
p
a1 sin α1 + b1 sin β1 + c1 sin(−γ1 ) + C1 sin(−δ1 ) = 0 P1 P3 ± P22 P12 + P22 − P32
γ1 = ± sin−1 ( ) (6)
(2) P12 + P22

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 Finally, we can calculate D1 position by IV. E XPERIMENTS
( A. Kinematics simulation
D1x = C1 cos δ1 + d1 cos γ1
(7) Precise position control of the 4-DOF TP gripper fingertip
D1y = C1 sin δ1 + d1 sin γ1
is by controlling rotation angel α1 and α2 . The twisting
B. F Determination movement is controlled by adjusting the value of parameters
d1 and d2 . Fig. 6 shows the relationship of these parameters.
The displacement F can be determined by studying the
second four bar link like above one. Follow the same law,
we have
−
→ −
→ → − →
a2 + b 2 + −
c2 + C2 = 0 (8) B. Gripper test
We also test the gripper performance within high accelera-
It is expended into
( tion and high speed movement by attaching it to an industrial
a2 cos(−α2 ) + b2 cos β2 + c2 cos γ2 + C2 cos(−δ2 ) = 0 robotic manipulator. In Fig. 7, it shows the basic three steps
within a complete twisting movement. According to the
a2 sin(−α2 ) + b2 sin β2 + c2 sin γ2 + C2 sin(−δ1 ) = 0
experimental results, it costs less than 0.6s to accomplish
(9)
twisting by rotating within 180 degrees.
From Equation. 9, we can get,
V. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORKS
b22 = a22 cos2 α2 + c22 cos2 γ2 + C22 cos2 δ2
In this paper, a novel jaw like gripper for precise twisting
+ 2a2 c2 cos α2 cos γ2 − 2a2 C2 cos α2 cos δ2
and positioning is designed and tested. It is significant to
− 2c2 C2 cos γ2 cos δ2 + a22 sin2 α2 + c22 sin2 γ2 introduce this TP gripper for flexible assembly in small
+ C22 sin2 δ2 − 2a2 c2 sin α2 sin γ2 + 2a2 C2 sin α2 sin δ2 sized manufacturing. This mechanical design can guarantee
− 2c2 C2 sin γ2 sin δ2 both effectiveness and dexterity, which can be proved by
(10) the experimental data. However, due to the reason that the
Q1 , Q2 , Q3 are calculated by, TP gripper is just designed, the future work will focus on
the experimental evaluation and mechanical improvement. At
Q1 = 2c2 (a2 sin α2 − C2 sin δ2 )


 the same time, control algorithm for adaptive and reliable
 Q = 2c (a cos α − C cos δ )

twisting is also should be designed.
2 2 2 2 2 2
2 2 2 2 (11)


 Q3 = a2 − b2 + c 2 + C 2 − 2a2 C2 cos α2 cos δ2 VI. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
+ 2a2 C2 sin α2 sin δ2

This research has received funding from the European U-
then γ2 is determined by nion’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under
p grant agreement n 285189 - AUTORECON.
Q1 Q3 ± Q22 Q21 + Q22 − Q23
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Objective rotation angle [rad] (a)-(b) [s] (b)-(c) [s] Total time cost [s]
π/2 0.12 0.22 0.34
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