• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.58-64
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• 2024

The ability of the robot gripper to handle a wide range of objects significantly impacts its operational effectiveness. Among the robot grippers commonly used, the economically feasible choice is the relatively simple structure of a parallel gripper. To perform more densely packed tasks with a parallel gripper, it should be capable of handling small objects. Therefore, this study designs a parallel gripper mechanism equipped with assisting grippers to ensure smooth grasping of small objects. The parallel gripper is designed using a rack and pinion gear system, with two additional grippers on both side, and these assisting grippers are designed to be detachable. The two assisting grippers have different type of tip to grasp thin fabric shapes and thin stick shapes. The gripper prototype is used to verify the grasping capabilities for shapes achievable with a conventional parallel gripper and those intended for grasping with the assisting grippers through grasping experiments. Consequently, by equipping a conventional parallel gripper with assisting grippers as in this study, it becomes capable of handling a broader range of objects, in addition to its existing functionality.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.491-498
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• 1998

Transplanting process during the tissue culture of potato seedlings is costly, since the cost of highly skilled labor working in the sanitary environment takes up about 60-70% of the production cost. The objective of this study was to develop a soft gripper of a transplanting robot system for the labor-saving tissue culture. The prototype of the soft gripper was consisted of power-transmitting part finger and plant contacts. The power transmitting part transformed the rotating motion of a step motor to the reciprocating motion of the finger. Plant stems used in the test were potato seedlings cultured for six weeks. The dimensional characteristics of cultured seedlings, the compressive strengths of the stems, the extractive force from the culture medium and the gripping force of the finger were measured. A proper gripping force was found to be 0.343N at the extractive force of 0.41N when the plant contacts were made of silicon. Sixteen plants out of 70 trials were tangled with others, resulting in the success rate of 77.1%.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.104-111
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• 2014

In this paper, we deal with robotic automation for assembling car brake modules. A car brake module is comprises of a torque member, two brake pads, and two pad liners. In the assembly process, brake pads and pad liners are needed to be inserted in a torque member. If we use a typical robotic hand for the assembly, task time takes too long. So, we propose two methods. The first method is to use an end effector that has five grippers capable of gripping five assembly parts. In the first method we attached the implemented end effector to a conventional 6 degrees of freedom industrial manipulator and performed the bake module assembly task. Experimental results show that the task time is remarkably reduced. The brake module assembly task needs the robot to change its orientation frequently, so, in the second method, we added one degree of freedom to the end effector that is used in the first method. By attaching it to a conventional 6 degrees of freedom industrial manipulator, we composed a 7 degrees of freedom redundant manipulator. A redundant manipulator has the advantage of flexible manipulation so the robot can change its orientation easily and can perform assembly task very fast. Experimental results show that the second method dramatically reduce whole task time for brake module assembly.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2012.11a
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• pp.540-542
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• 2012

카메라를 탑재한 파이프 등반용 로봇의 매니퓰레이터가 카메라 영상을 이용하여 파이프를 파지하기 위해서는 파이프의 영상처리와 매니퓰레이터의 관절각 계산 알고리즘이 필요하다. 본 논문에서는 이를 위한 방법과 구현에 대하여 기술한다.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Technology Engineers
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.563-569
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• 2012

In the semiconductor and display device production processes, the handling of sensitive objects needs new carrying technology. Floating carrying motion is a practical alternative solution for non-contact handling of parts and substrates. This paper presents a study of through paths inside the air pressure pick-up head to generate the floating motion. The air motion by conceptual designed paths inside the head gradually develops positive pressure and vacuum between narrow objects. Positive pressure occurs through the head tip before discharging outside of the head. Negative pressure is developed by evacuating the inside head bottom as result of the radial flow connecting the vertical through-holes. The numerical analysis was done to figure out the stable levitation caused by the two acting forces between surfaces. In comparing with the standard case that the levitation gap gets 0.7-0.9 mm, it confirms the suggested head characteristics to show floating capacity in accordance with the head size, number of through-hole, and locations of through-hole in succession of conceptual design for a prototype.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.277-284
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• 1998

This study was conducted to develop m automatic pot-seedling transplanter for plant factory. The transplanter consists of a gripper, row-spacing control device, nursing tray transfer system, growing trough transfer system, and gripper moving device. The gripper picks up pot-seedling. The gripper moving device moves the gripper between nursing tray and growing-flat. Nursing trays are moved to workspace by the nursing tray transfer system. The growing trough transfer system was developed to move growing trough to workspace. The row-spacing control device was used to adjust the distance between adjacent plants traversely. The results of this study are as follows. The transplanting capacity of the developed transplanter was 7.1 seconds per cycle or 1.18 second per pot-seedling. Successful planting was 98.9% without seedlings and 95.8% with seedlings.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.193-199
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• 2015

This paper dealt with a pincers-type gripper being able to grip a heavy-weighted cylindrical object having various size with itself. This gripper should be designed to seize the objects without any change of jaw shape. Grasping achieved equilibrium after the object slipped on the jaw while grasping it. To cope with this situation, we suggested the slip considered gripper design procedure based on grasping equilibrium. The obtained slip condition can provide a limit friction coefficient depending on the contact angle when initiating contact between jaw and object. Consequently, the gripping force and the required actuating force can be calculated. In order to verify the proposed slip condition, the simulations were performed using a dynamic software.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.23-28
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• 2021

The gripper with a soft pneumatic actuator uses a soft material, unlike the gripper that uses a rigid body, so it is safer and lighter to interact with objects without advanced control technology. Among the soft pneumatic actuators that have been studied, PneuNets actuators have bellows shape, which enable quick operation and complete bending with only small material deformation at low pressure. In this study, we suggested improved form of PneuNets actuators to obtain the performance of the soft actuator that a larger bending angle and larger bending force at a small pressure. An experiment was designed and conducted to measure the bending angle and bending force according to the pressure. As a result, it was confirmed through experiments that the improved model has a maximum bending angle at a pressure of 5 kPa lower than that of the previous model, and a maximum bending force of 1.97 times at the same pressure.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.274-280
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• 2024

With the recent emergence of collaborative robots, demand for grippers to be used in service sites is increasing. Soft grippers have advantages in terms of compliance, cost, weight, and stability, but it is difficult to handle objects of various shapes, sizes, and weights with a single gripper. In this study, based on a fluidic elastomer actuator (FEA), we propose a pneumatic soft gripper that can grip a variety of objects, consisting of fingers capable of both grasping and vacuum suction and a base with variable stroke between the fingers using a pneumatic cylinder. A check valve is installed inside the finger, so that when positive pressure is supplied, the finger expands to perform adaptive grasping, and when negative pressure is supplied, vacuum suction can be performed. Grasping experiments were conducted on various objects to evaluate the performance of the proposed gripper, and 94% of 54 gripping objects were successfully grasped.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.507-514
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• 2022

Mobile manipulators are getting lime light in the field of home automation due to their mobility and manipulation capabilities. In this paper, we developed a small size manipulator system that can be mounted on a mobile robot as a preliminary study to develop a mobile manipulator. The developed manipulator has four degree-of-freedom. At the end-effector of manipulator, there are a camera and a gripper to recognize and manipulate the object. One of four degree-of-freedom is linear motion in vertical direction for better interaction with human hands which are located higher than the mobile manipulator. The developed manipulator was designed to dispose the four actuators close to the base of the manipulator to reduce rotational inertia of the manipulator, which improves stability of manipulation and reduces the risk of rollover. The developed manipulator repeatedly performed a pick and place task and successfully manipulate the object within the workspace of manipulator.