A cooperative gripper for handling and hanging limp parts

The paper investigates the prospects of extending flexible automation and intelligent manufacturing options in the field of textile and clothing industries. In particular the paper focuses on the automatic gripping and handling of limp and soft materials that is a needed step to extend automation beyond the fabric parts cutting by exploiting options of robotics, already in use for most of the manufacturing of automotive electric, electronic and mechanical goods. The manufacturing section here considered in clothes manufacturing is the cutting room and the task is picking up a piece of fabric from the cutting table and forward it single out, flat in a well defied pose to the following manufacturing sections. The robotic system purposely developed is presented: it includes: - a metamorphic robotic gripper to carry out automatically the cut part picking tasks and giving back the part hung; - a reconfigurable passive hanger. The system architecture and main components are presented.