Development of high-speed gripper with closing and releasing capability

There are many recent studies on hyper-human technology like high speed grasping. An existing systems uses the release energy of a spring for high-speed grasping with an arm action with 100G. However, this gripper did not have the ability to release the object. To improve the feasibility of the system for real applications, both grasping and releasing functions are required. In this paper, we propose a prototype high-speed gripper which has the ability to both grasp and release. The conventional system used a spring to achieve high speed gripping. The grasping force decreases as the distance up to the object increases. In contrast, the gripper proposed here uses an air cylinder to open and close the gripper, so that the grasping force does not decrease as the distance increases. Preliminary experiments are conducted and the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism is evaluated.