Robotics Industry News, Applications and Trends

When watching how the 2-Finger Adaptive Robot Gripper works in the following video you might ask yourself; how this Gripper can be so versatile while using only one actuator? The secret lies in its unique mechanical architecture.

Always driven by the idea of giving manufacturers maximum flexibility in the automation of high-mix processes with a single electric gripper, Robotiq is thrilled to announce today the availability of the 2-Finger Adaptive Robot Gripper.

ICRA, which stands for International Conference on Robotics and Automation, is the largest conference of its kind in the world and although it mainly focusses on academic research, most of the big players in industrial robotics are present. It is therefore a very nice opportunity to see the innovative applications that comes out of the labs from all around the world. The theme this year is Robots and Automation: Innovation for Tomorrow's Needs. For those of you who will have the chance of being at the ICRA 2012 conference, which will be held in St. Paul (Minnesota) this week (14-18 of May), here is a list of what, in my opinion, are the "must see" events.

This is only the second year for the virtual trade show, Tech ManufactureXPO and attendance greatly surpassed last year, proving that it was well appreciated by the attendees and the industry. The speakers were excellent and provided a diverse set of topics concerning automated manufacturing.

We, at Robotiq, believe that the product should adapt itself to the customer, not the opposite. This is also true for the mechanical interface, as we adapt our Gripper faceplates to fit any robot wrist. But it is more importantly true for the communication protocol which will be used to send commands to the Gripper and receive its status. We currently support six widely used communication protocols: Ethernet/IP, TCP/IP, DeviceNet, CANopen, EtherCAT, RS-232. This flexibility makes our Grippers easy to interface without the need of a converter or other complicated gizmos. Let's take a quick look at each of them.