A Methodology for Structural Static and Fatigue Optimization for the Mechanical Design of Robotic Grippers

Structural simulation has become a common task in engineering practice due its advantages, namely cost reduction and unlimited testing prior to manufacturing. On the one hand, over the last years personal computers have become powerful enough to run complex simulations. On the other hand, industry has seen an increase in automation, where repetitive tasks done by humans, in the past, are gradually being replaced by robotic systems. Those robotic systems usually involve a robotic manipulator, a gripper, and a control system. This article presents a gripper with a novel two-finger design, for which a design methodology was applied using the Finite Element Method (FEM). The gripper model was subjected both to static and time-varying loadings and static and fatigue analysis were performed. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology was evaluated, and it can be concluded that the mechanical behavior of the gripper can be significantly improved through the application of the methodology. It is found that the genetic algorithm is the one that shows better feasibility and results in significant improvement on the mechanical behavior of the studied part. In the future, further work can be done on evaluating the methodology for other engineering parts, with other geometric parameters, or for the same part, but with different values of the parameters (different model size). Future work can also address the manufacturing and testing of the developed two-finger robotic gripper.