• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 1997.12a
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• pp.88-98
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• 1997

This study was conducted to develope the gripper of a robotic transplanter for bedding plants. Specific objectives of this study were 1) to develope the gripper for plug tray seedlings and 2) to find the suitable finger type for transplanting. The performance of gripper was tested and compared by two different transplanting methods, which were to consider the leaf position of seedlings and not to consider. The results of this study are summarized as follows. (1) The gripper of a robotic transplanter was developed and tested with 4 different finger type. (2) The shovel type finger was suitable for transplanting with the least percent of damaged seedlings.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.22-27
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• 2012

This paper presents a ball screw-driven robotic gripper mechanism which is possible to grasp an object and analyzes its kinematic feature for grasping by simulation. For the purpose of identifying the feature of the robot gripper, we try to confirm the kinematics relating the joint space of the driving actuator to the gripper's tip space. To be specific, the proposed robot gripper employs one actuator and a symmetrical closed-chain structure. As a result, the specified robot gripper has an advantage of robustness to external forces structurally, and it is easy to implement simple grasping operations. Also the gripper has a useful squeezing effect for power grasping.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.282-287
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• 2022

High shear adhesion on wet and rough surfaces and tactile feedback of gripping forces are highly important for realizing robotic gripper systems. Here, we propose a bioinspired robotic gripper with highly shear adhesion and sensitive pressure sensor for tactile feedback systems. To achieve them, we fabricated multi-walled carbon nanotube sensing layer on a thin polymeric adhesive layer of polydimethylsiloxane. With densely hexagonal-packed microstructures, the pressure sensor achieved 9 times the sensing property of a sensor without microstructures. We then assembled hexagonal microstructures inspired by the toe pads of a tree frog, giving strong shear adhesion under both dry and wet surfaces such as silicon (42 kPa for dry and ~30 kPa for underwater conditions) without chemical-residues after detachment. Our robotic gripper can prevent damage to weak or smooth surfaces that can be damaged at low pressure through pressure signal feedback suggesting a variety of robotic applications.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.271-276
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• 1998

A gripper mechanical design using a pneumatic system was developed to successfully grip, hold, and release a seedling plug for transplanting it. The gripper comprised of two air cylinders and shovel-type fingers. The gripper can grasp and hold a seedling by sliding the two fingers attached to the two separate air-cylinders, mounted at an angle of 15$^{\circ}$ When releasing a plug, retraction of the fingers gives a seedling little attachment to the gripper. To prevent seedling from attaching to the fingers, press-plates were attached to the end of the gipper. Transplanting performance of the developed gripper was tested with cucumber seedlings at different soil moisture contents. Overall transplanting performance of developed gipper was higher than the performance of the previously developed gripper. Best transplanting result was achieved at medium level of soil moisture content.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 1997.06c
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• pp.238-246
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• 1997

This study was conducted to develop a robotic transplanter for bedding plants. The robotic transplanter consisted of machine vision system, a manipulator, a gripper and plug tray transfer system. The performance of the robotic transplanter was tested and compared by two different transplanting methods, which were to consider the leaf orientation of seedlings and not to. Results of this study were as follows. (1) A cartesian coordinate manipulator for a robotic transplanter with 3 degree of freedom was constructed. The accuracy of position control was $\pm$1 mm. (2) The robotic transplanter with the machine vision system, the manipulator, the gripper and the transfer system was developed and tested with a shovel-type finger. Without considering the orientation of leaves, the success rates of transplanting healthy cucumber seedlings in 72-cell and 128-cell plug-trays were 95.5% and 94.5% respectively. Considering the orientation of leaves, the success rates of transplanting healthy cucumber seedling in 72-cell and 128-cell plug-trays were 96.0% and 95.0% respectively.

• 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.15 no.2
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• pp.107-114
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• 2020

In robotic harvesting, a gripper to manipulate the fruits needs to be attached to the robot system. We proposed a flexible robot gripper that can actively respond to the shape of an object such as fruits in the previous work. However, we found that there is a possibility of not being reliably gripped when the object slides during contact with a finger. In this paper, the improved gripper design is proposed to fundamentally solve the problems of the previous gripper. The position of the finger and the maximum closed position are changed, and the design improvement is performed to increase the grip stability by changing the installation angle of the link portion of the finger. Based on the improved design, a modified gripper is fabricated by 3-D printing, and then gripping experiments are performed on spherical object and fruit model object. It is shown that the gripper can stably grip the objects without excessive bending of the finger link of the gripper. The contact pressure between the finger and the surface of the object is measured, and it is verified that it is a sufficiently small pressure that does not cause damage to the fruit. Therefore, the proposed gripper is expected to be successfully applied in harvesting.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.2307-2310
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• 2005

A pressurizer is one of the major safety related equipment of nuclear power plants. In order to inspect and maintain the internal structures of a pressurizer, jumpers have to enter the pressurizer, in spite of the high dose exposure. Therefore, a tele-operated robotic manipulator has been developed, which consists of four parts with 2DOFs arms, a gripper, base frame, and control console. The task of this robotic manipulator is to extract the damaged electric heaters and inspect the internal structure of the pressurizer. The gripper hanging from the manipulator approaches the heaters and extracts the damaged heater by using a self-locking mechanism. In order to investigate the structural stability of the robotic manipulator, a stress analysis has been performed by using the ANSYS code. The results of this paper include the position control and vibration control of robotic gripper and the development of processing visual information for a vision sensor.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Industry Convergence
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• v.25 no.6_1
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• pp.953-959
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• 2022

In this paper, the design result of robotic tools and the development of robot control system for chemical coupler assembly are presented. This research aims to eliminate the risk of chemicals exposed to human operators by developing the robotic tools and robot automation system for chemical tank lorry unloading that were done manually. Due to tight tolerance between couplers, even small pose error may result in very large internal force. In order to resolve the problem, the 6-axis compliance device is employed, which can provide not only enough compliance between couplers but also F/T sensing. The 6-axis compliance device having large force and moment capacity is designed. A simple linear gripper with rack-and-pinion is designed to grasp two sizes of couplers. The proposed robot automation system consists of 6-DOF collaborative robot with offset wrist, 6-axis compliance device with F/T sensing, linear gripper, and two robot visions.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.227-232
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• 1996

It is a tedious job to handle seedling trays in a green house with human hands because of their fluctuation when they are moving. A robotic gripper for handling a seedling tray has been developed., which has two fingers consisting of the vertical and horizontal bars. The maximum deflections at the center of the seedling trays were measured with various lengths of the horizontal bars. The length of 250 mm was revealed to be optimal one, resulting less than 15 mm deflection with a $540{\times}270mm$ seedling tray, which was acceptable for a practical use. For this study a LM system was adopted to move the fingers. To validate this system the robotic gripper was installed on a Cartesian robotic manipulator and their performance was tested several times with great success. The robotic manipulator used in this study was a general one, so a special one for this robotic gripper needs to be developed in future.