The gripper project aims to develop a gripper to sort the collected waste and safely manipulate it as required by the river cleaning process. We are using a two-finger gripper with a gantry arm to conduct the above-mentioned tasks. The system is actuated electro-mechanically which allows better control and does not require additional resources for pneumatics on the boat. We found that the gantry arm is the only feasible solution regarding the dimensions of the boat.

To test various designs and evaluate whether a design would meet the requirements to sort a big variety of waste. The company Schunk has lent us an electro-mechanical two-finger gripper (PEH 30) for early testing of different finger designs. For this, a test setup has been designed and built. On this test station, the gripper remains in a fixed position and, various fingers will be tested, with respect to their ability to grasp different waste particles that are typically found in rivers.