A Double Jaw Hand Designed for Multi-object Assembly
This work addresses industrial assembly challenges for robotics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing gripper designs with specific mechanical improvements.
The paper tackles the problem of multi-object assembly in robotics by designing a double jaw hand with two orthogonal parallel grippers, enabling the robot to hold two objects and perform in-hand manipulations like insertion and ejection, as demonstrated in peg-in-multi-hole assembly tasks for the World Robot Challenge 2018.
This paper presents a double jaw hand for industrial assembly. The hand comprises two orthogonal parallel grippers with different mechanisms. The inner gripper is made of a crank-slider mechanism which is compact and able to firmly hold objects like shafts. The outer gripper is made of a parallelogram that has large stroke to hold big objects like pulleys. The two grippers are connected by a prismatic joint along the hand's approaching vector. The hand is able to hold two objects and perform in-hand manipulation like pull-in (insertion) and push-out (ejection). This paper presents the detailed design and implementation of the hand, and demonstrates the advantages by performing experiments on two sets of peg-in-multi-hole assembly tasks as parts of the World Robot Challenge (WRC) 2018 using a bimanual robot.