Design of grasping methodologies for rotational assembly components

This article describes a design methodology for grasping assembly components. Three heuristics are developed. The first determines feasible grasping configurations based on component geometric information. The second heuristic determines feasible grasping configurations by including gripper functional attributes. The third heuristic generates the final set of grasping configurations by including the area available for grasping a component. An interactive program written in Fortran 77 is developed to capture the user inputs, and a sample application is described. The methodology does not assume an initial feeding state of the component to the robot. The grasping configurations generated (if more than one) provide the designer with alternate feasible feeding methods.