Dev elopment of Universal Robot Gripper

We developed a smart magnetic fluid called MR fluid. The specific gravity of the developed fluid is half and its solidification hardness is twice that of MR fluid. In this paper, the characteristics of the MR fluid and an application that can control solidification under a magnetic field are described. Further, we developed a novel robot gripper using MR fluid, and several experimental results investigating the features and capabilities of the gripper are presented. I. INTRODUCTION Various types of end effectors of industrial robots have been developed to adapt the robots to various tasks. End effectors used to grip objects are called grippers. The general industry practice is for grippers to employ automatic exchange equip- ment in accordance with the position and shape of the target in the working process. However, these equipments require several procedures such as the selection of the appropriate gripper and the design of a grip plan according to the estimated position of the target that have become a bottleneck for their employment in a high-speed automatic factory.