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The current/old state in this setup is an UR5-Robot arm from Universal which is used with a force torque sensor(ft150) and the 3-finger gripper from robotiq at the tool surface. The gripper is connected with a data and a power cable which are mounted at the outside of the arm.
In our setup we make an object recognition surrounding the robot arm, due to that we get issues with the cables. So our goal is to get rid of them. To run the gripper it is necessary to have a 24V with 1.5A power supply. The tool output provides a maximum of 0.6A at 24V, measuring showed that there is a fuse when you go over this current. Also the tool output is not designed to forward a RS485 connection.
To solve the problem with the connection, we use a wireless communication channel between the hand and the computer via bluetooth. For the power supply we use the cable inside the tool surface which power the tool connector. This cable provides up to 2A at 48 Volt(or probably more, but we don't need more), see the measurements. To get this connection out of the closed box we drill a small hole through the top and lay a prepared cable through that hole. This cable splits the power supply, so that the board is still running. If we cut the supply for this board, the robot throws an error even if we are not working with it. At the outlying power supply we want to connect a DC/DC transformer to get the 24V. The result of our measurements show that we can get over our 2A, so this should work. For the conversion of the new power supply on the outside of the gripper click here.
The picture below shows the power final power supply.
