Recent years have been challenging for the North American manufacturing industry and momentum is picking back up. While it is still fresh in their memories, manufacturers are more conscious than ever that they must reduce costs while also increasing the flexibility of their processes to react faster to market changes. It is in this context that Robotiq launches the Adaptive Gripper at Automate 2011.  The Gripper is the world’s first industrial dexterous gripper that gives industrial robots “hand-like” capabilities to enhance their ability to manipulate a wider variety of parts, detect a grip and control pressure on a given part.

“Applications with a very high number of different parts are challenging to automate if using today’s current one part / one tool approach. Tooling gets complicated, and changing grippers increases cycle time and lowers Return-on-Investment. As such, many of these applications are still performed with human operators.” explains Erik Nieves, Director of Technology for Motoman Robotics. Motoman is a Robotiq partner which will be distributing the Adaptive Gripper.