Concept of a three D.O.F spherical-joint gripper for industrial robots

This paper presents a new design concept for spherical-joint supported gripper that can be easily installed on industrial robots. The purpose of this joint design is to increase the flexibility of the robots´ movements by adding three additional degrees-of-freedom (d.o.f) in one single compact joint. In doing so, the trajectory can be enhanced or more simple ones be used. In addition, this design does neither require extra links nor modification of industrial robots structures since it is being installed as an end-effector. The theoretical analysis and the model of the spherical-joint gripper will be exemplified by a prototype that was built to study the efficiency of this approach.