• factors
• gripper
• parameters
• processes

The variety of tasks that can be performed by a robot and the enormous range of components, different for shape, size, material and weight that can be manipulated, make the use of only one typology of gripper for an entire handling process more difficult. Beyond this, today, the choice of the gripper that best fits a specific task is still made intuitively and based on the worker’s experience. This leads to the generation of extra costs due to the implementation of not working solutions and to wasting a lot of time in searching for feasible configurations. A new approach able to help in the systematical analysis of the different types of handling processes is therefore required.
Unfortunately, the existing techniques and methodologies for the selection of a gripper do not provide an approach suitable for all the handling tasks, because, in most cases, the work is limited to the analysis of just one category of gripper and of the only few parameters that visibly influenced its performances. Even the approaches that have been found to be more complete, do not investigate the possible links existing among the parameters through which the process can be described and therefore, they lose the capability to forecast the consequences that a change of working situation can have on the gripper choice and hence on the task outcome.
In order to face these deficiencies, the goal of the present work is to develop a method to describe gripping processes through the representation of the factors that should be set up in order to achieve an optimal task implementation and of the relationships existing between them.
After reviewing the literature regarding parameters that characterize a handling task, this thesis develops a sensitivity analysis in order to delineate the trend that a change in a parameter of the task can produce on the other process variables. The implementation of the method is then provided on MATLAB with the construction of a Graphical User Interface that allows the calculation of the quantitative values associated to each parameter. The conclusion of the work is the validation, which is applied to the model in order to confirm the results obtained. The validation regards three cases of real working applications: the first is a pick and place process executed by a vacuum gripper, the second and the third cases, instead, deal with an assembly and disassembly processes respectively and are performed by a parallel gripper.