A Hand Combining Two Simple Grippers to Pick Up and Arrange Objects for Assembly

This letter proposes a novel robotic hand design for assembly tasks. The idea is to combine two simple grippers—an inner gripper, which is used for precise alignment, and an outer gripper, which is used for stable holding. Conventional robotic hands require complicated compliant mechanisms or complicated control strategy and force sensing to conduct assemble tasks, which make them costly and difficult to pick and arrange small objects, such as screws or washers. Compared to the conventional hands, the proposed design provides a low-cost solution for aligning, picking up, and arranging various objects by taking advantages of the geometric constraints of the positioning fingers and gravity. It is able to deal with small screws and washers, and eliminate the position errors of cylindrical objects or objects with cylindrical holes. In the experiments, both real-world tasks and quantitative analysis are performed to validate the aligning, picking, and arrangements abilities of the design.