Three-Finger Gripper

A robotic gripper with three fingers, sitting between a two-finger gripper and a five-fingered dexterous hand.

A three-finger gripper is an end effector mounted on a robot arm that picks things up with three fingers. A common design lets two fingers rotate around the palm to change their layout, facing the third finger; that lets it pinch like a two-finger gripper, or wrap around a cylinder or a ball using all three fingers together. Compared with a two-finger gripper, it has more contact points, grips more securely, and adapts to a wider range of shapes; compared with a five-fingered dexterous hand, it uses fewer motors, has a simpler mechanism, and holds up better over time. Many three-finger grippers are underactuated (fewer motors than joints), so a finger automatically curls to conform once it touches an object. They're used in both research and industry; well-known examples include the BarrettHand and the Robotiq 3-Finger Adaptive Gripper.

ExampleBarrettHand: three fingers, two of which can rotate around the palm — a common choice in early grasp-planning research.

Also called

Three-Fingered Gripper, Adaptive Three-Finger Gripper

Related

Gripper · Parallel Jaw Gripper · Adaptive (Underactuated) Gripper · Dexterous Hand · End Effector · Grasping

Sources

Robot end effector - Wikipedia