SCHUNK announces new long-stroke robotic gripper with high gripping force

March 11, 2019 – SCHUNK has announced the upcoming release of its Co-act EGL-C long-stroke gripper for human/robot collaboration.

The gripper achieves high gripping forces up to 450 N and combines them with a long stroke of 42.5 mm per finger. The 24 V tool is suitable for handling workpiece weights of up to 2.25 kg and can be flexibly used in a wide range of applications. 

The Co-act EGL-C gripper has the potential to handle weights beyond the small parts assembly, which the company says is ideal for the automotive-related supply industry.

Force measuring jaws and an incremental encoder are integrated in the base jaws, and permanently control the individual gripping forces and the position of the gripper fingers.

The gripping procedure is stored in the gripper, and is divided into several phases: Up to a theoretically taught distance of four mm to the workpiece – corresponding to far less than the thickness of a finger – the gripping force is limited to 30 N. If a collision should happen in this approach phase, e. g. due to the operator’s hand, the gripper immediately goes to the safety-monitored stop, without the risk of causing an injury.

In the second phase, at a workpiece distance of less than four mm, the fingers are closing at a freely definable maximum force of up to 450 N. If the system measures a compliance issue in the closing phase – this could happen if a gripped workpiece is too small and the operator wants to remove it manually – this movement is also automatically stopped. The same applies if the expected workpiece dimensions are exceeded by two mm, as, for example, no component is available.

In the third and final phase, the gripper detects if the component is safely gripped and activates the integrated gripping force maintenance by applying the brake. This ensures that the gripped component does not get lost even in the event of an emergency stop. A

The long-stroke gripper from the SCHUNK Co-act series comes preassembled and is available with matching interfaces for HRC robots such as KUKA, YASKAWA, FANUC, Universal Robots, and NACHI. 

The gripper will be available by the end of 2019.