Gripper for spools
AssigneeNV Bekaert SA
InventorJohan HUGELIER
Life of this patent
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Abstract
The invention relates to a gripper (100) for finding, clamping and releasing spools (120) having a circular grip part (122) such as a flange or a bore hole as well as a method to operate such gripper. The gripper (100) comprises a driveable clamp (102) that is provided with a scanning system (106) comprising ‘presence-absence detectors’ (108) that detect the presence of the absence of the circular grip part (122). The gripper (100) is slowly moved over the flange of the spool and by means of the detectors (108) and some calculation the centre of the grip part (122) is identified followed by the gripping of the spool. The gripper (100) has the advantage that no back-and-forth movement is needed in order to locate the circular grip part (122).
Claims16
A gripper for finding, clamping and releasing a spool with a circular grip part comprising
- (a) a driveable clamp for clamping and releasing said grip part on demand, said clamp having a reference axis, said reference axis coinciding with the axis of the spool when clamped, said clamp having a clamp size configured to the diameter of the circular grip part of the spool;
- (b) a scanning system for identifying the axis of the spool
- characterized in that
- said scanning system comprises two or more sensors organized equidistant along a line, said two or more sensors for sensing in a direction parallel to said reference axis the presence of the spool, said reference axis defining a reference plane perpendicular to said reference axis, wherein the distance between any two adjacent sensors is less than the clamp size.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.