A novel, flexible, multi-functional handling device based on Bernoulli Principle

Food handling sector in food industry has increased rapidly over the last years. A higher production rate together with continuously growing product assortments put new re- quirements for the food producers such as improving production efficiency, working conditions, enhancing hygiene standards, and impacting on yield margins and prof- itability. Food industry has been identified as a major growth area for the application of automation systems. Therefore, handling devices or robot grippers have been adopted as a solution for the manual handling operations and automation in order to achieve the requirements mentioned above.However, most of these grippers yet been used in industry or proposed in the literature are specifically designed for dedicated tasks, and could not be revised for other forms, size and heavy load conditions. Consequently, the inflexibility of the grippers available today is limiting the use of robots in the food industry. Recently, various flexible grip- per designs have been proposed to overcome these weaknesses; however, they present several drawbacks: (1)- their applications are limited, (2)- their maintenance and the material used for their design are cost prohibitive and (3)- they usually consume a lot of energy.The aim of this research is to develop a novel and universal gripper for handling food products. The main characteristics of the gripper are flexible, durable, cost-effective, easy to operate and maintain, and energy-efficient. The proposed multi-functional grip- per aided with four fingers for handling different mechanical properties of unpacked food products. The gripper operates using Bernoulli principle of generating a high- speed flow between the gripper plate and product surface thereby creating a vacuum which lifts the product. A pick and place workstation with multi-functional gripper has been developed and tested. The outcome of the evaluation concluded that the research had achieved its aims