In this short film, you can see four techniques that have been developed, tested and evaluated by KU Leuven. At KU Leuven they are working hard on developing and testing new techniques for the portable, robotic Material Recovery Facility (prMRF).
Techniques presented in the video:
1) High Airflow Vertical Conveying (HAVCO) gripper.
This innovative gripper uses air nozzles located at the bottom to generate a vacuum by utilizing the Bernoulli effect to lift the objects and blow them through the flexible tube into the correct output fraction.
2) Hybrid gripper combining vacuum and parallel gripping.
This gripper operates using tendons allowing to individually control both fingers and, hence, the dimensions of opening the gripper.
3) Standard actuator with parallel finger mechanism.
The gripper is pneumatically actuated, which allows for a highly responsive gripping action.
4) The same gripper can throw objects instead of dropping them off, allowing to increase the picking speed by smart programming of the robot trajectory.