New, Advanced Gripper Tech Debuts

Hi Tom,

Nearly two years ago, we got inquiries from a number of warehouse and logistics robotics automation suppliers who were looking for better gripper technology.

We learned that the current designs did not meet their requirements and the general e-commerce companies where increasingly focusing on SKU handling as their next step in automation.

After investigating the dominating and most innovative current gripping designs and listening carefully to warehouse robotics system builders’ requirements we initiated an initial ideation process to generate potential concept designs that we believed to be able to significantly improve the ability to cope with the challenge.

We frame our benchmarking around 12  technical KPIs that would help to select the most promising concepts and benchmark them to state of the art current offerings.

Based on our inherited culture of design philosophy to apply bionic and self-compliance, we surprisingly fast ended a design that, in its core, has survived all the way to its final product design, as we now are bringing to market.

It’s based on a hybrid technology stack that both involves soft and hard kinematics, and has been optimized (topology, weight, range, impact forces and robustness, compliance etc.) and simplified in terms of both manufacturing complexity, maintenance and operation.  

We kept working with a couple of these system suppliers to ensure a frequent review and expectation alignment throughout the whole design and development project, and still have a close dialog with them which we appreciate highly. All of this was conducted in a highly bootstrapped environment that ensured sharp focus and firm/frequent review and validation.

One of the key innovations by MAXXgrip X2 – with the telescopic cylinder – that is a proprietary part of our design—is the air-operated telescopic cylinder. Its elegance is that all air supply is fed from the top end, and it’s driven by both vacuum to extend the actuator/opening the finders and compressed air to retract and close the fingers. Another unique feature is that the finger is underactuated and driven by flexible pull-belts.

This hybrid kinematics and actuation design gives some quite extraordinary benefits.

The principle of conjoined vacuum and compressed air drive allows us to both extend and contract the piston from one side of the seal chamber inside the pistons. This reduces the complexity and weight significantly. This works well here since we always are opening the gripper without payload and vacuum works fine in our atmospheric environment here on earth.

You may note that the driving belts are linked to the actuation cylinder via a soft rubber like belly, this is another unique element that facilitates that the power transfer to the fingertips are damped so the interception impact forces equally are reduced, without losing any final clamping forces though.

Due to the kinematic structure and arrangement the fingers will withstand unintended impact with f.i. a tote wall or a neighboring object as they will softly bound upward during impact. This also serves to reduce damage risk due to normal operation.