Development of A Novel Vacuum-Suction Gripper Capable of Changing Gripping Position

Picking-and-placing is a common industrial task. In practical application, there is a potential situation that the shape and the size of the workpieces vary greatly, thus it is difficult to use the grippers with fixed suction cups to grip the workpieces. To solve this problem, a novel vacuum-suction gripper has been designed to adjust the positions of suction cups as requested. Also, in this research, there is a new algorithm proposed to confirm the optimal positions of the gripping points. Finally the feasibility of this algorithm has been verified through the simulation on different patterns as well as the adaptability to workpieces with different patterns through the gripping experiments on the acrylic tiles with different patterns. Results show that the vacuum-suction gripper performs well in the given patterns, while the algorithm only has a great adaptability to some patterns.