Students: Matthew Brown, Zackery Gray, Peter Macdonough, Randall Percival, Amanda Winter
Advisor: Dr. Mizanoor Rahman
Robotic hands, called grippers, have been increasingly used in the manufacturing industry in the past few decades for automation and precision. In recent years, entire factories have been constructed on the basis of robotic automation with hundreds, even thousands, of robotic arms to do various repetitive tasks. In every case, robotic grippers are used to handle numerous products, materials, and other objects throughout their work. For this reason, we set out to develop a relatively small robotic gripper (about six inches long) that can be mass-produced using 3D-printing technology. A series of parameters and design goals were attributed to this product and as a group, we narrowed down the parameters to a set of five main criteria, compact, modular, safe, smooth/efficient, and manufacturable. Upon arriving at these certain design conditions, the model of the gripper could be crafted, tested, printed, and retested. Our first step was to draw conceptual systems that could prove to be the most effective option at which point the excavator type was selected. The main reason behind this choice stemmed from the design’s ability to have more than two fingers which satisfied the modular criteria. In addition, the product fits approximately in a 7–8-inch space which satisfies the compact criteria due to the small frame. Furthermore, the products have strong manufacturable value due to the compact finger and frame designs and can be mass-produced via 3D printing. The methods, the resultant 3D-printed robotic gripper, and the performance of the product prototype were evaluated, and satisfactory results were obtained.
Keywords: Design, manufacturing, 3D-Printing, grip strength, PLA