New Scale Robotics’ PG-10-20 gripper/caliper
In the world of tiny grippers for tiny jobs, it may be that New Scale Robotics has the market for tiny a bit cornered. The company’s new PG-10-20 is actually two tiny things in one tiny package: A gripper that can pick and place like its larger brethren, but also a precision caliper for measuring and QCing of tiny parts.

How small is New Scale-tiny? Well, the company’s founder, Dave Henderson, said in an interview that they’ve “made modules that move optics in mobile phone cameras with micrometer precision.” And we all know that the optics in our cellphones are really, really small.

In fact, the small world of New Scale robotics is burgeoning.  For example, just the global micromachining market is $2.4 billion (2020) and is forecast to $3.3 billion by 2025. The growth of this market is accelerated by the growing demand for the miniaturization of electronic devices. Like Henderson’s “optics in mobile phone cameras”.

Henderson noted during the interview that a “significant number of applications work with small parts, less than 100 grams [3.5 ounces; about the weight of 20 U.S. nickels] and include CNC machining, injection molding, die casting, grinding and polishing optics, electronics assembly and testing, and lab automation.”

That’s a big market.  His company’s precision grippers, installed on cobots, “automate labor intensive inspection tasks by integrating part picking, measurement, data logging, sorting and assembly.”

Even in our digital world of automation and instant data, testing and quality control of machined parts is mostly done by hand, and the resulting data is jotted into a notebook by hand, which means someone with a pair of calipers in hand is doing lots of piece work.  The PG-10-20 gripper and electronic caliper automates the QC process, eliminating human piece work (and the labor cost associated with it), and, as a nice bonus, digitizes the data flowing from that automated process.

Since most of the world’s manufacturing, according to McKinsey, is automatable but still not automated, with “478 billion of the 749 billion working hours (64 percent)” still in manual mode, eliminating the high cost of trained labor for QCing parts is very important, especially for small manufacturers (23,000 in the U.S. alone) with tight margins.

The PG-10-20 gripper/caliper is a plug and play tool, which all cobot grippers need to be these days just to survive, and optimized for high-mix, small-batch manufacturing—agile automation—which means fast deployment and re-deployment of automation in response to product changes.

The PG-10-20’s metrology capability is an add-on package of fingers and fingertips that attach using a hex wrench. New Scale’s website claims that the resolution of its electronic digital calipers is 2.5 µm (0.0001 inches).