USE OF PERMANENTLY PRESSURE‐SENSITIVE CHEMICAL ADHESIVES IN ROBOT GRIPPING DEVICES

Recent advances in both robotic technology and polymer chemistry have yielded techniques and materials capable of handling textile fabrics without excessive engineering complexity or fear of damage to the fabric. Chemical adhesives have often been used in the past for fabric manipulation but due to some serious constraints inherent in most adhesives the technology has been largely relegated to the use of consumable adhesive tapes. Many of the problems previously encountered have now been overcome by the use of polymer gum materials which have extremely long tack lifetimes. This has led to the development of a number of gum unit end effectors (GUE) for the purposes of fabric handling, manipulation and ply separation.