Hardware

Vacuum Gripper

A vacuum gripper is an end effector that holds objects with negative air pressure applied through one or more suction cups, generated by a vacuum pump or a compressed-air Venturi ejector. It excels on flat, smooth, non-porous surfaces such as boxes, glass, and sheet metal, and is the dominant gripper type in logistics picking and palletizing. Grip reliability depends on seal quality, cup geometry and material, and object porosity.

Why it matters for physical AI

Suction simplifies the grasping problem to predicting a single contact point, which is why many learned bin-picking systems output suction poses and why warehouse deployments of robot picking overwhelmingly rely on vacuum end effectors.