Industrial Gripper System

Built an industrial gripper subsystem spanning the CAN driver, ROS service layer, and tablet UI — supporting a multi-position servo gripper and a magnetic gripper. Layered blocking request/response semantics on top of the asynchronous CAN bus, and integrated grippers as first-class program steps in the executive interpreter.

Implemented the CAN gripper driver with multi-position servo control. Commands route through a ROS service to the shared CAN bus manager, which constructs and sends frames then waits for the matching response or a timeout — exposing synchronous semantics to callers. Additional configuration commands cover grip-force and travel calibration. Basket/contact detection parses status bytes from the response frame.

Built a magnetic gripper driver with binary on/off actuation, sharing the same ROS service interface as the servo gripper for transparent substitution. A gripper registry dispatches commands to the correct driver during program execution. On the custom gantry platform, integrated gripper operations with text-to-speech audio feedback — useful in noisy industrial environments where the operator may not be watching the screen. UI components include a full settings page for calibration and inline controls.