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Robot gripper guides and automation notes

Selection guides, comparison notes, and application articles for electric grippers, cobot tooling, long stroke handling, and grip-with-rotation automation.

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Robot gripper guides and automation notes

This knowledge base collects selection guides, comparison notes and application write-ups about electric gripping. The guides are written for buyers and integrators who have to defend a decision internally, so they focus on what to check rather than on which model to buy.

How the guides are organised

Buying guides cover selection end to end. Comparison notes put two approaches side by side. Application notes follow one production task from part to hand-over. Company notes cover how projects are handled. Start with a comparison note if you are deciding between two actuator types, and with an application note if you already know the task.

Using these guides

The guides on this page are written to be read once and then used as a checklist. Keep the guides that match your own task open while you work through the others; the overlap between two guides is usually where the real constraint shows up.

Work area with assembly tables and shelving
Work area and assembly tables
Gripper components arranged on an assembly bench
Components on an assembly bench
Blue grippers displayed on white platforms
Grippers on display
Close-up of a gripper with linked fingers
Linked gripper fingers

FAQ

How often are new guides published?

New selection notes and application write-ups are added as projects raise the same questions repeatedly.

Do the guides recommend a specific model?

They explain what to check and why. Model direction follows from your own part and cell.

What to prepare for a review

Send the part drawing, or a photo with a scale, together with the weight and the surface condition. With those, the review works from the actual part rather than from the catalogue.

  • Contact — whether the finish allows a flat finger or calls for a shaped one, and how much off-position variation the gripper choice has to tolerate.
  • Cell — the robot or axis, the mounting pattern, the cable route and the space around the tool, all checked against the review.
  • Control — the controller and fieldbus already on the line, and whether the gripper choice is commanded from the robot, a PLC or a separate module.
  • Cycle — what the cell expects on the worst shift rather than the best run, carried into selection as a design margin rather than an exact figure.

That is the working brief for the review, and in practice it is enough to start one without a site visit. Every item above is asked once, which is what keeps the review from turning into a second questionnaire later.

Keeping this list next to the drawings is worthwhile: the review questions are the same ones any review will raise. Where a point is still unknown, mark it and continue, because the decision can be revisited once the cell is defined.

Selection guides, comparisons and application notes

The guides here are grouped by the question they answer. Selection guides walk through a choice end to end. Comparison notes put two approaches side by side so the trade-off is visible. Application notes follow one production task from part to hand-over. Together they cover the ground between “what is a robot gripper” and “which unit fits this cell”.

Reading order matters less than starting from your own open question. If you have two candidate approaches, read the comparison first. If you have a task and no direction, read an application note. If you are writing an internal justification, read a selection guide and use its structure as the outline.

New notes are added when the same question keeps arriving from different projects. That is why the collection grows around real constraints — part variation, surface marking, cycle stability, hand-over — rather than around product announcements.

How to use a guide in an internal review

A selection guide is most useful as a shared checklist. Circulate the checks before the review and ask each person to mark what they know and what they do not. The gaps that appear are almost always the items that would have caused rework later.

Comparison notes are useful for the opposite purpose. When two teams prefer different solutions, a written comparison moves the conversation from preference to criteria, because each side has to name the constraint that drives its choice.

Application notes work best at the start of a project, before a solution has been fixed. A short review of a similar task usually reveals one or two constraints that would otherwise be discovered at commissioning — and discovering them on paper is far cheaper than discovering them on the line.

Electric gripper models

Selection guides and applications