Design of a Robotic Gripper with Compliant Mechanisms and Metamaterials to Facilitate Material Handling in a Learning Factory

The robotics industry has evolved alongside the latest industrial revolution, Industry 5.0, where element manipulation is essential for industry automation. This work presents the process of designing, manufacturing, and testing a gripper for a collaborative robot developed to assist in material handling processes in a learning factory. The utilization of metamaterials to manufacture a gripper permits the grasp of objects without deforming them, allowing the tool to adapt according to the shape of the element to be held, in contrast to conventional industrial grippers. Additionally, by evaluating properties such as compliance, deformability, and adaptability for the objects, as well as grip strength achieved through compliant mechanisms, and by leveraging additive manufacturing technologies allowed to generate a flexible structure that can accommodate different types of geometries, shapes, and textures. The experiments were carried out in a learning factory located in a university that produces a logic probe for circuit testing. This work also includes a comparative analysis using commercial grippers. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

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