The AR Gripper is an open hardware parallel robot gripper designed for handling everyday items such as bottles and cups.
I haven't created a store yet. But I will sell unassembled kits for ~500€ (excl. VAT) and maybe also pre-assembled and tested grippers.
I you want to be informed when the gripper kit is ready for order just fill out the following form.
https://chilipepper.io/form/burning-yellow-habeneros-48193b26-8a89-4aa7-81d4-97493d5af63b
Rendering of the AR Gripper
The AR Gripper in real life
I designed this gripper because I couldn't find any robot grippers that fulfilled my requirements of building my bartender robot "Roberto the Robot" which are the same time cost-effective.
Roberto with the Robotiq Hand-E end of 2019
Roberto with the Robotiq Hand-E end of 2019
I first tried the Robotiq Hand-E, because it was available to me. It is an adaptive electric parallel gripper with a stroke of 50mm. Unfortunately, the items I liked to handle had a diameter of up to 90mm (big coke bottle) and the price is quite high (>3000$). However, I liked the simplicity and modular design of the gripper. For the first version of Robert, I designed custom gripper fingers that made it possible to grip tools and bottles using a special counterpart. Another huge disadvantage of the Hand-E is its weight of 1kg, which is okay for the Borunte robot I used, but can be a challenge for smaller robots.
Because I wanted to handle bottles and other tools without prior modification I started to look for alternative grippers. My requirements were:
Most of the gripper products I found did not satisfy the cost requirements or were just too small. I also found a couple of open hardware designs, such as for example the open hand project, but they all looked discarded.
I then found a the SAKE Robotics EZGripper an under actuated electric gripper design, which satisfied all of my requirements. I used this gripper to improve Roberto the bartender and the gripper mostly worked as expected. However, I needed to make some adaptions to the gripper pads, to increase the friction between bottle and gripper.
Roberto with the EZGripper mid 2020
Roberto with the EZGripper mid 2020
Later last year, I started to work on a smaller low-cost robot. Ironically, the EZGripper would have cost more than the rest of the robot, which seemed wrong and just did not satisfy my requirements.