Material handling is one of the most labor-intensive and expensive aspects of manufacturing. Assembling a pair of Nikes, for example, requires up to 40 pieces of material to be stacked and heated to create the shoe upper, which is the flexible part that sits on top of your foot. It can take a human worker…

Industrial grippers have made headlines recently, mostly thanks to breathtaking new prosthetics, smarter material-handling machines and fairly brisk robotic innovation. However, traditional pneumatic grippers still dominate industrial-assembly and robotic applications. That’s because pneumatic grippers are reliable, come in myriad sizes and grip quickly. They’re also cost effective and simple to control, according to Peter Farkas, […]