April 19, 2011 - Robotiq releases Gripper robot hand. The Gripper is the world’s first industrial dexterous gripper that gives industrial robots “hand-like” capabilities to enhance their ability to manipulate a wider variety of parts, detect a grip and control pressure on a given part.
Adaptive Gripper is the first dexterous gripper that is rugged and simple enough to bring required grasping flexibility to today’s manufacturing settings. The Gripper is focused on applications that have a very high parts handling variety and complexity of parts geometry. Examples of applications are in: assembly, parts transfer, machine tending or parts positioning in welding.
Applications with a very high number of different parts are challenging to automate if using today’s current one part / one tool approach. Tooling gets complicated, and changing grippers increases cycle time and lowers Return-on-Investment. As such, many of these applications are still performed with human operators.
The technology has been in development and testing for the past two years.