This technology describes an electroadhesive gripper capable of selective grasping, transporting, and releasing of various objects for layered assembly.
The majority of currently available additive manufacturing (AM) processes are unsuitable for fabrication of dissimilar parts in the same build process. While modifications of existing AM methods allow for co-fabrication of dissimilar materials, these approaches are limited by low resolution. Furthermore, these methods sacrifice vital material properties such as high conductivity and stiffness in favor of maintaining in-printer compatibility. There is a need for an improved AM process capable of successful multi-material printing to facilitate fabrication of smart structures and optimize nanofabrication processes.
This technology is a versatile electroadhesive gripper device for use in layered assembly (LA), an improved AM method for production of multi-material parts that relies on parallel, layer-by-layer deposition of voxels. The gripper device utilizes electroadhesion, a scalable, low-power grasping method that is effective on essentially any material, for parallel placement of voxels. Various parameters including the applied voltage and pneumatic feeder pressure can be modified to improve gripping kinetics and grasping performance. This gripper can grasp objects of various shapes, is compatible with non-planar and/or non-square grid array configurations, and can be modified to include interdigitated electrodes for the sensing of feedback for further control. As such, this technology may be implemented across a diverse range of automatable processes and robotics.
This technology demonstrated the selectively parallel, multi-material gripping necessary for LA, with successful selective parallel gripping of 3 x 3 mm conducting and non-conducting voxels.
IR CU19231
Licensing Contact: Dovina Qu
