Synthesis and Optimization of a Needles Robotic Gripper Mechanism for transplanting seedlings

摘要

Automatic Transplanting seedlings process in nurseries has become very popular in last years, and grippers play a key role to grasp seedlings, where most of them only use needles with a penetrating approach. Dimensional synthesis focused on seedlings and a series of requirements is very important in grippers design. This paper proposes a dimensional synthesis of a needles gripper mechanism for two transplanting approaches: Penetrating and Clamping, allowing versatility. The gripper is based on a slider-crank mechanism and synthesis is taking as a constrained optimization problem, minimizing the RMS Error of the needle angle, and considering mechanical advantage and transmission angle to have a better transmission forces. Comparative studies between single and multi-objective optimization algorithms were conducted to obtain optimal results.