Pneumatic Gripper

A gripper whose fingers open and close via compressed air pushing a piston.

A pneumatic gripper uses compressed air to push a piston inside a cylinder, which drives the fingers open or closed through a linkage or rack-and-pinion mechanism, with a solenoid valve switching the air path to control “open” and “close.” It's mechanically simple, cheap, fast-acting, strong-gripping, and durable, making it one of the most common end effectors on factory production lines. Its downside is that it usually only has two positions, fully open and fully closed, so grip force and opening width are hard to control precisely, and it also needs an air compressor, tubing, and solenoid valves. Embodied AI research more often uses electric grippers, because a policy needs to output a continuous opening width; but in high-throughput material handling and sorting, pneumatic grippers remain the mainstream choice.

ExampleA two-finger pneumatic gripper picking parts off an assembly line: a PLC sends a signal to a solenoid valve, the air path switches, and the fingers close to grip the part.

Also called

Pneumatic Finger Gripper

Related

Gripper · Electric Gripper · End Effector · Pneumatic Actuation · Vacuum Suction Cup · Parallel Jaw Gripper

Sources

Robot end effector - Wikipedia