Development of a Reconfigurable Four-Bar Mechanism for a Human Robot Collaborative Gripper

With the rise of collaborative robots in industries, this paper proposes a human robot collaborative gripper for a windshield assembly and visual inspection application. The collaborative interface which acts as a haptic feedback device is mounted on the gripper using a deployable mechanism. The kinematics of a reconfigurable mechanism are analyzed to illustrate the advantages for using it as an unit mechanism and the concept is extended to a parallelogram based deployable four bar mechanism. A novel threefold reconfigurable four bar mechanism is developed by creating adjacent units orthogonally and the connection between such units are investigated. The proposed mechanism can be deployed and stowed in three directions. Locking of the mechanism is proposed using mechanism singularity. Kinematic simulations are performed to validate the proposed designs and analyses.