Being a one-man team with a busy schedule of research and business development, I limited the scope of my project to something attainable. A robotic gripper is something I had always wanted to build, especially since most of my research up to this point had been related to ground-based driving robots (and little to no experience with manipulators). I found a simulation of a robotic gripper online that met the requirements of this project, which was a design that utilized a four-bar mechanism (Figure 1 and 2).
Figure 1: Robotic Gripper Design
Figure 2: Robotic Gripper Simulation
This design expanded on that requirement with use of two mechanisms (one a five-bar with a linear input and one a four-bar with a rotational input). After sketching out the mechanism based on a rough model of the gripper found online, I re-created the simulation with Matlab in order to gain an understanding about the velocities and accelerations involved. This design was then modeled in Solidworks, where I could also verify the closing of the gripper from the linear motion of the middle link. The build brought on its own set of challenges and compromises, but a working prototype was realized as shown below (Figure 3).
