Design method for temporarily energy self-sufficient vacuum gripping systems

摘要

Rising sales in the past and ongoing predicted growing sales in the future of industrial robots and especially collaborative robots endorse the trend of increasing human-robot-collaboration. Depending on the form of collaboration there are possible application scenarios in which there is no barrier between robot and worker whereby they share a common working space with the possibility of a mutual interference resulting in a potential safety hazard. Industrial robots are often used to perform handling tasks using vacuum gripping systems. But vacuum gripping systems manufacturers face new challenges when it comes to HRC. In case of an outage of all supply energy carrier like electrical power and compressed air the work piece eventually drops after an undefined period of time due to leakage. This can lead to severe damage considering that in case of handling heavy objects like car batteries the weight of said work pieces can reach up to more than 100?kg.Current methods for designing vacuum gripping systems solely focus on either positioning of the gripping point or the transmission of the gripping force between gripping system and work piece. This contribution presents a method of designing a vacuum gripping system focusing on how to determine which characteristics the gripping system should have in order to remain in a safe state for a predefined amount of time after the supply energy fails. This method allows expanding the current design process by implementing the applicability to HRC tasks based on an extended functional analysis. It can be applied to a broad range of use case scenarios as it is based on the use of scalable off the shelf products which are individually combined based on previous calculations especially designed for this purpose.