Accelerating Robotic Picking of Rigid Objects with a Compliant Pneumatic Gripper and an Impact-Aware Trajectory Plan

Industrial robots are capable of moving at high speed. Each time they come into contact with their environment, e.g. to pick up an object, they decelerate to a near standstill. A solution involving a compliant pneumatic gripper and adapted trajectory plan is presented to initiate contact at a higher speed while remaining within hardware limits. By adding overload clutches in either the robot arm or gripper, tolerance to errors is provided. The key parameters such as gripper compliance and maximum allowed initial impact velocity are identified. Results show that by properly optimizing these parameters, robot picking of rigid objects can be accelerated. The complete high-speed picking solution is experimentally verified. A time reduction of 16% was obtained when making contact at 0.65 m/s.