ReC-Gripper: A Reconfigurable Combined Suction and Fingered Gripper for Various Logistics Picking and Stowing Tasks

This article presents a gripper comprising finger and suction with reconfigurable attributes. With the reconfiguration feature, the proposed gripper has a configuration suitable for different working environments of logistic order picking. The finger part of the gripper was configured with the parallelogram remote center of motion (RCM) mechanism to implement re- configurable features. With the RCM mechanism, the gripper implements the function of zeroed offset, which removes the gap between the finger and the suction gripper, and the function of the supporting finger. In order-picking tasks, the gripper shows higher grasping stability and practicality than existing grippers. First, the design of the mechanism and model constituting the gripper is described. Afterward, a quantitative evaluation of the performance of this gripper compared to the existing ones in the bin and shelf environment is conducted. In this section, the gripper shows 32.912% improved performance in representative tasks. Finally, the practical aspects of this gripper are described through a quantitative evaluation.