Magnetic Grippers for Unstructured Robotic Workspace

Industrial application of present-age robotic system for material handling operations has progressively become more challenging in situations of unstructured environment. Magnetic gripping of ferromagnetic substance is one such domain that draws research interest, especially when used in unstructured robotic workspace. This book brings out indigenous design, modeling, analysis, fabrication paradigms and test results of representative magnetic grippers for industrial robotic systems. The novelty of the present research lies with the design semantics of the various layouts of the magnetic gripper for a customized operation of lifting ferromagnetic work-pieces from an unstructured heap using Finite Element Analysis and contact mechanics-based grasp synthesis model. Grasp synthesis using stochastic vis-à-vis contact mechanics based models have added due significance to the overall evaluation of the deployability of the gripper systems. The performance of the prototype magnetic gripper in the field was benchmarked through mathematical model as well as application programming, pertaining to this maiden application of robotics in Indian steel industry.