The development of and experiments on a smart gripper system for 3C assembly

Abstract

As one of the most important components in the robotic automation industry, gripper plays a key role in pick and place, assembly, packaging, etc. However there is no suitable gripper can be applied to handle small parts in 3C assembly. Faced with such an urgent and enormous demand, a novel electric force controllable gripper system has been developed in this thesis. According to the general process in 3C assembly line, we designed the whole system from software to hardware and have made twice improvements to make it compact, light-weight and easy to use. The design procedure and technical details such as motor control, force sensing and control, collision detection and mechanical design will be discussed with a series of experiments in the thesis. Finally, the smart gripper system is mounted on the end effector of a industrial robot to finish the real work. The performance of the gripper system gives us more improvement suggestions which set the basis for the future works. And more importantly it is proven that using robots to realize 3C assembly has broader prospects.

Date of Award	2014
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology