It’s not every day that a new player emerges in the North American robotics market.
In the video above, we get to meet OnRobot, a global company based out of Odense, Denmark, which recently entered the North American market with their RG2 Gripper and dual gripper configuration.
“Our company was established two years ago,” said Torben Ekvall, CEO of OnRobot. “We at OnRobot are specialists in collaborative grippers. We can connect to the Universal Robot arm, and what we have done with our collaborative gripper is integrated it smoothly into the teach pendant.”
Typically, when an end effector and collaborative robot don’t come from the same source, there is the chance for communication challenges between the two products at the teach pendant. An excessive amount of cabling and programming time is also a common challenge.
The RG2 Gripper has been specially developed to reduce necessary wiring and simplify programming, Ekvall explained.
“One of the biggest challenges with classical grippers is that you either have air or pneumatic grippers, or you have electrical grippers that need signal and power cables. If we could make an interface that works through the IO connector that’s already at the end of the arm, that would be the optimal solution for the end user. That’s exactly what we did.”
The RG2 dual gripper shown in the video above has a gripping force between four to 40N, with a stroke of between zero and 110mm.
“The interesting thing about this gripper is that feedback actually goes back into the robot and into the teach pendant, so you can read out exactly how big a piece of equipment it has picked up, among other information,” Ekvall explained. “Through the teach pendant, you can enter customized width and force.”
With greater customizability in the strength of force that the gripper uses, the cobot can be optimized for high mix, low volume applications.
“Let’s say you want to pick up a sponge. You can pick it up with a lower force, and if you wanted to pick up a 2kg hammer head immediately after, you can do that with the same setting,” Ekvall continued.
“Thanks to the teach pendant and the way we have enabled the programming of the configurations of the gripper and the robot, operators can easily change what the robot can do, so you won’t need an engineer to come and reprogram it.”
For more information on the RG2 Gripper, visit the OnRobot website and the company’s Universal Robots + page.