Intelligent Gripper

Sammanfattning: The human hand is a great generic gripper as it can grasp objects of unknown shapes, weights and surfaces. Most robotic grippers in today's industry have to be custom made and tuned for each application by engineers, thus many man hours are required to get the desired behavior and repeatability. To be able to adapt some of the capabilities of the human hand into robust industrial robotic grippers would enhance their usability and ease the tuning by engineers once installed. This thesis discusses the development of a robust intelligent gripper for industrial use, based on piezo sensors which have the ability to both sense slippage and detect objects. First, an experimental sensor prototype was developed successfully using an amplification circuit and algorithms implemented in LabView. Secondly, a final prototype containing a signal board, an FPGA board, a simple gripper with linear units and more robust sensor modules where developed. The thesis further discusses which parts of the intelligent gripper that have been successfully implemented within the project time frame and which parts that needs to be further implemented, tested and improved.