Summary
A French SME has designed and manufactures a new system of grippers to handle pieces in industry. The vacuum gripper is flexible and allows to handle tilted pieces by robots. The SME is looking for robot’s or special machinery manufacturer and integrators for a commercial agreement with technical assistance.
Description
A French company specializes in the design and manufacture of origami-folded products. This folding allows innovative functionalities to the product and the French SME develops so a vacuum-operated gripper.
Today, mainly industrial vacuum-operated grippers are developed to handle products which are positioned flat and horizontal. The problematic is the gripper doesn’t have any flexibility or tilt.
The French SME proposes a new operated-vacuum gripper made of a flexible gripper allowing its torsion and bending. By this way, the piece’s handling is easier.
Moreover, thanks to its bending and torsion flexibility, the gripper doesn’t need to be precisely positioned overhead the product to be handled.
The proposed gripper is made of 2 mounting plates, relied by the origami-folded pipe and a suction cup.
The pipe is made of polymer and folded using an origami technique. This folding could be modified regarding the specifications requested for the gripper.
Several sizes of the pipe could be manufactured and so several sizes of the grippers are available with:
- Diameter ranges from 35 to 100 mm
- Stroke length from 34 mm compressed to 1300 mm extended
On top of that, the pipe supports temperature from -40°C up to 80°C and is resistant to UV, solvants, oils shocks, dusts. Stress tests of the origami pipe demonstrated a resistance of 10,000,000 cycles before any break (with 3 cycles/s).
The French SME looks for integrators, robot’s manufacturer or developer of special machinery to propose its grippers under a commercial agreement with technical assistance.