Autonomous Mechanical Controlled Grippers for Capturing Flying Objects

In flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) "throwing" as a new approach for transportation of parts between machines is proposed. "Throwing" brings up the problem of capturing. For capturing fast flying objects grippers are required, which have a closing time of less than 10 ms. In this paper two types of mechanically controlled grippers are proposed. At the first type of a gripper the kinetic energy of the flying object is used to close the gripper. With that a flying ball with a mass of 60 g and a speed of 10 m/s can be captured with a closing time of the gripper of 5 ms. At the second type of gripper a pre-stressed spring is used to close the gripper. With that a flying ball with a mass of 20 g and a speed of 10 m/s can be captured also with a closing time of 5 ms.