Vacuum Suction Cup

An end effector that holds an object using negative pressure from air pulled out of the cup.

The vacuum suction cup is one of the most common end effectors in industry: once the cup presses against an object's surface, a vacuum pump or vacuum generator draws the air out from inside it, and the pressure difference between inside and outside holds the object against the cup. It's mechanically simple, cheap, and needs little positioning precision — as long as it can reach a reasonably flat, airtight surface, it can pick the object up — so it's widely used in logistics sorting, e-commerce order picking, and unstructured (bin) picking. Its weaknesses are that it doesn't work well on porous, rough, soft, or very small objects, and it can't perform operations that need fingers working together. Many picking robots combine a suction cup with a gripper.

ExamplePicking arms in Amazon warehouses commonly use suction cups to lift boxes and plastic-bag-wrapped items out of bins.

Also called

Suction Cup, Vacuum Gripper

Related

End Effector · Gripper · Bin Picking · Sorting · Order Picking · Palletizing / Depalletizing

Sources

Suction cup - Wikipedia