In this thesis study, a two-fingered gripper and a four-fingered multipurpose gripper are developed and manufactured. In addition to development of robotic hands, computer control hardware and software are also developed for computer control of both hands. The two-fingered gripper is designed for a specially defined pick and place operation. Its task is to pick a cylindrical work piece and place it in the appropriate position in a flexible manufacturing cell. Pneumatic actuator is used for power generation and mechanical links are used for power transmission. Fourfingered gripper is designed as a multipurpose gripper. The task is not predefined for this gripper, so, human hand and previous dexterous hands are taken as model during design. It consists of 3 fingers and a thumb. It has 1 degree of freedom for every finger and thumb. Pneumatic actuators are also used for this gripper. Rope and pulley system is used for the power transmission mechanism. Structures of both hands are manufactured from 5083 series aluminum. Gripping force can be controlled by the pressure regulator of the pneumatic system for both hands. Computer software is developed for the control of open and close motion of the fingers. Also, a motion control card is designed and manufactured for control of the pneumatic valves.

In order to fulfill increasing production rates, new automated production technologies are required for manufacturing carbon fiber reinforced plastic components for the aerospace industry. Currently, large, double curved composite components have to be manufactured manually, which leads to high process times and poor scalability. As a consequence, a team of cooperating robots with passively adjustable end-effectors was developed, that is capable of handling dry carbon textiles and can be used for layups in double curved molds. This thesis deals with the implementation of a robot program, that performs an automated adjustment of each end-effector to the surface geometry of the manufactured part. The functional principle and the accuracy of the process are evaluated. Further, the automatically adjusted end-effectors are utilized to cooperatively layup carbon plies. The results show, that the accuracy of the automated adjusting process is sufficient to drape carbon fabrics during pick-up and automated layup is possible with this approach. In conclusion, the developed process can be integrated into a fully automated process for future experiments, but hardware inaccuracies should be improved, in order to further enhance the accuracy of the system.