Often a gripper of some sort is required on the business end of a pick and place mechanism. Usually commercially available units meet the requirements, and we have had the opportunity to evaluate the strength and weaknesses of many of the common products offered by Festo, SMC, Robohand etc, in production environments.

Some gripping applications cannot be solved with off the shelf components and the machine designer has to start from scratch. The gripper shown below was designed to pick finished parts off the end of pallet line. The three parts it has to handle are radically different but other than a signal from the PLC no change over is required.