| Summary: | This thesis describes an investigation of devising a high speed single gripper which can provide all necessary gripping tasks required to assemble a gas regulator. This is novel in that the creation of a single gripper that can be precisely controlled to grasp a range of engineering components of widely different handling characteristics has not, to the author's knowledge, been previously studied. A novel feature of the investigated high speed gripper is the inclusion of a prismatic sliding element at the end of each fmger to facilitate the handling of large and small compliant components typically found in the assembly products such as a domestic gas regulator. Also, a unique vacuum system on the fingertips griper was created to pick up quite small engineering components such as a support plastic component, and 'O'rings. The fmgers are to be controlled in a manner which mimics the kinematics and dynamics of the thumb, middle finger and index finger of a human hand. This mimicry is required to design the correct motions and tactile forces necessary to grasp delicate and non-delicate engineering components. The design of the dexterous gripper finger is validated in simulation results as proof that this gripper fmger design can achieve the best performance. The grasping control method was extended to control of the trajectory gripper, the prismatic sliding elements and vacuum system. So the methods could be used in future research. Multi-closed loop PID control is applied to control the kinematics and dynamics motion of the three fingered gripper systems.
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