On medical product production lines, some workpieces may look easy to pick. But once they are put into an automated process, the requirements can be much higher than for ordinary industrial parts.This time, the workpiece we tested was an IV bag cap.After the customer sent us samples, we first confirmed that there were two size versions: approximately 30 mm and 29 mm in outer diameter.Since this is a medical product, hygiene is an important consideration. The soft gripper is made from food-contact-grade materials, with complete certification documentation, making it suitable for applications involving medical products with high hygiene requirements.
There was another practical point to consider.The customer provided two versions of the product:30 mm OD / 29 mm ODA 1 mm difference may not sound like much. But with a traditional rigid gripper designed for a single size, even a small variation may require the gripping position to be adjusted or the gripper to be changed.One advantage of a soft gripper is that its fingers can undergo a certain degree of adaptive deformation when they contact the workpiece.For products with small dimensional variations, gripping does not have to rely entirely on extremely precise rigid positioning. Instead, the soft fingers can adapt to the shape of the workpiece and create a more conformal contact.This makes soft grippers useful for automated handling of multiple product sizes with small dimensional differences.
When people first come across soft grippers, they often associate them with picking up fruit, food, or other soft objects.But the value of a soft gripper isn't simply that it is “soft.”For a medical plastic part such as an IV bag cap, it provides a more flexible way of making contact with the workpiece:
The goal is not simply to make the gripper clamp as tightly as possible, but to find the right balance between secure gripping and product protection.
An IV bag cap is small and lightweight, so at first glance, it may seem like a very straightforward workpiece to automate.But once you add requirements related to medical products, hygiene, multiple sizes, and contact materials, the application becomes quite different.This is something we often see when testing soft gripper applications:The real question is often not “Can we pick it up?” but “How can we pick it up while meeting the requirements of the entire production process?”For medical products such as IV bag caps, the final gripping solution still needs to be validated according to the customer's specific material, production environment, cleaning/sterilization requirements, and automation equipment.If your application also involves multiple product sizes, limited gripping areas, or strict requirements for gripper materials and product surfaces, testing with real samples can be a practical place to start.