Design of gripper for handling materials with variable thickness

Recently, it has been researched to adopt the dual arm robot at the packaging and assembly line of an electric device such as a mobile phone. At the research area of the end-effector development, it is necessary to extract demanded functions and to allocate these functions to allowable numbers of end-of-arm-tool (EOAT). On allocating steps, it is often occurred that one EOAT must grip materials with variable thickness. Especially in the case of linear motion type gripper among EOATs, the drive mechanism of gripper has non-linear problems due to long strokes. In this paper, as a part of reducing the non-linear effects of linear type gripper's drive mechanism, we describe the gripper that has proposed jaws to grip materials densely loaded in a box with variable thickness, with short strokes. Further we describe the design of drive system.