Design of the hybrid gripper with the jaw-tip grip and suction
End effectors are disposed in the end of the manipulator. And the end effectors do physical contact with target materials for doing assigned and required tasks. On the analysis of requirements for assigned tasks, there is one gripper should handle the solid material and soft material together. In the pick and place task, it is better to do suctions than grips. For this need, in this paper, we describe the proposed gripper that can do grip the solid material and absorb the soft material. Further the proposed gripper has linear motion guide (LM guide) and electric motor for linear displacements. This leads to various suction strategies.
A robust soft and vacuum hybrid end-effector and compliant arm for picking in clutter
OF THE THESIS A Robust Soft and Vacuum Hybrid End-Effector and Compliant Arm for Picking in Clutter by Hristiyan Kourtev Thesis Director: Kostas Bekris Robotic grasping has been an active area of research since the dawn of robotics. With recent advancements in artificial intelligence, vision, planning and machine learning, robots are beginning to enter unstructured and unknown environments, such as warehouses. Warehouse automation and, in particular, picking, is an increasingly popular application domain due to its significance in logistics operations. It usually involves a robot picking a list of items from a shelf, often in parallel with human workers. Different items are usually packed close together in bins and require an end-effector that is small and versatile. Due to the constrained and unstructured nature of the corresponding workspace, sometimes collisions with the environment are not easily avoidable. This thesis outlines the design and fabrication of a hybrid end-effector that uses both suction and mechanical grasping courtesy of soft-robotics inspired fingers mounted on a flexible arm extension, both of which very robust and capable of sustaining multiple collisions without failure, which could otherwise be expensive and time-consuming. Furthermore, the combination of suction, grasping and soft robotics is a novel idea and offers additional benefits such as low weight and inexpensive components.
Fully Integrated Bidirectional CMOS-MEMS Flow Sensor With Low Power Pulse Operation
Leveraging More-than-Moore technology, we demonstrate an integrated CMOS MEMS flow sensor via a very compact system on chip (SoC) that can sense the bidirectional N2 gas flow. Our SoC features a very low-noise instrumentation amplifier that is implemented on a CMOS wafer and serves as a readout integrated circuit for a thermoresistive micro-calorimetric flow sensor which is fabricated on a MEMS wafer. A compact heterogeneous integration is achieved by combining the two wafers via the proprietary InvenSense AlN process. The measured sensitivity of our CMOS MEMS flow sensor is 98 mV/sccm which is three times better than the state-of-the-art counterpart. The flow range measured by our SoC is from −26 to 26 m/s (from −50 to 50 sccm). Moreover, the pulsed heater operation makes this proposed SoC flow sensor a very low power (<9 mW) and, thus, a promising candidate for the Internet-of-Things applications in smart home/green buildings.