Assembly is an essential process in industries in which one part has to be inserted into a hole. Owing to various tolerances, the part and the hole do not align which makes it difficult to assemble. Often to overcome this issue, power consuming active robotic gripper combined with expensive sensors ( force-torque, visual servoing, etc.) and complicated control loops are adapted.

In this project, I designed a 5-degrees of freedom (DOF) flexure based passive gripper for pick and insert tasks capable of handling limited misalignment.  The complete operation is divided into three processes - picking, alignment during insertion and releasing. For each process, a mechanism based on flexures is designed. Owing to its passive design, the developed gripper does not require any additional power for its operation. Moreover, use of flexures eliminates joints and revolutes, making the gripper cost efficient and easy to manufacture as well as maintain.