Autonomous Robotic Gripper

The gripper is compliant: no sensors, no force feedback, no servo positioning. Just a four-bar linkage with a soft silicone pad that conforms to whatever it's closing around. A single motor drives two jaws through a cam that keeps grip force roughly constant across a wide object range.

The vision side was OpenCV and a crude depth map — enough to find the centroid of whatever was on the table and point the arm. The interesting result was how forgiving the system became once mechanical compliance did the work that stiff grippers ask of the controller.