Three Arm Vacuum Gripper
Randomly placed conveyor products are one of the hardest picking problems in automation. We built a vacuum gripper with three independently retracting arms for vision guided random picking.
The robot uses a vision system to locate and orient itself to each product, and each of the three arms reaches down independently to pick a part, so one pass collects three products regardless of how they arrived on the conveyor.
INDUSTRY
Consumer Goods
PRODUCT
Three Arm Vacuum Gripper
Project Highlights
The Challenge
Products arrive on the conveyor in no particular order or orientation, and a rigid single position tool cannot cope with random presentation.
The Solution
Three independently retracting arms, each picking one product at a time under vision guidance, with independent air flow per arm tuned to the product.
Key Features
An organic printed structure keeps the tool light, and the vacuum channels are printed directly into the body with no external plumbing.
The Result
Three articulated arms with independent air circuits would be a plumbing nightmare in machined tooling. Printed as one body, the tool picks random products reliably.
