Instrumentation of robotic grippers for dynamic control of robotic systems

Abstract

With the rapid development of information technology (IT), manufacturing technologies have been greatly leveraged in terms of the intelligence level, productivity, flexibility, and capabilities of systems. The evolution trend in developing a modern manufacturing system is to adopt as many smart `things' as possible to achieve a high level of functionalities, responsiveness, and flexibility in a cost-effective way. On the other hand, commonly-used functional modules in a system must be equipped with appropriate instrumentation, so that real-time data related to the states and operations of modules can be collected and utilized to support decision-making units at upper system levels. In this paper, we present a cost-effective solution as the instrumentation of generic robotic grippers. The requirement of real-time force measurement is discussed, low-cost strain-gauges are proposed as sensing elements, and the method for designing the layout and circuit of embedded instrumentation are presented. The design concept and methods have been implemented and validated via prototyping and experimenting. The proposed embedded design is applicable to other robotic modules where real-time force measurement is needed for a wide scope of the Internet of Things (IoT) based applications.