Design and Development of 3D Printed Robotic Gripper

3D printing provides a wide variety of usages for many industries. Being a newly developed technology, many applications that uses it require more process refinement in both the design and production phase. This paper touches upon the design and development of a 3D printed robotic gripper. A robotic gripper is a functional tool used for picking up and moving objects of various sizes, depending on
the size of the gripper. Its purpose requires it to be able to provide both grip and necessary force to hold on to objects. This means it needs a proper design of the gripper
from the displacement mechanism down to the contact surface. Moreover, with 3D printing being a relatively young technology, the design process also takes into account
the effect of adding or removing different design elements from the gripper on the 3D printing quality and amount of support material used. The design is printed on 3D
Systems CubePro while the build and support materials initially used are red ABS and white PLA, respectively. The materials are later switched around due to unfavourable
results and the red ABS is ultimately changed to green PLA due to material shortage. The mechanism used in the gripper is a combination of slider crank and parallelogram linkage mechanisms.