The present invention relates to a gripping head of a handling apparatus, of which the inflated tubular surface is to grip objects such as lipsticks and the like.
FIGS. 1 and 2 show a typical conventional gripping head. As seen, gripping head comprises a hard cylindrical body 100 open at both ends thereof, a tube 101 covering the inner wall of the body 100 and open at both ends thereof, and a fluid path 102 formed in the hard body 100. When a fluid such as air is supplied from the fluid path 102, the tube 101 is inflated inwardly and the inflated surface of the tube 101 grips on object. Both ends of the tube 101 are folded back from inside to outside of the hard body 100 and secured to the hard body 100 with calking rings 103 and 104. The hard body 100 has an outwardly protruding flange-shaped portion 100A. The fluid path 102 is formed in this flange portion 100A, and also taps 105 are formed on the flange portion 100A for installing the gripping head in the handling apparatus. The flange portion 100A has to protrude at least 10 mm from the hard body 100. The gripping head of the above-mentioned structure is moved up and down after being installed in the handling apparatus by means of the taps 105.
However, an attempt to grip a plurality of objects 200 such as lipsticks as shown in FIG. 18 all at once with the gripping heads shown in FIGS. 1 and 2 disposed side by side in a line will be unsuccessful unless the lipsticks are placed with sufficiently wide spacings for the gripping heads to exactly face the correesponding lipsticks without interfering with each other. The outside diameter R of the individual gripping heads is so large that when a plurality of the gripping heads is placed correspondly to a plurality of the lipsticks disposed with narrow spacings, in a line, they will theoretically overlap each other as shown by hatching in FIG. 3. Also in the conventional gripping head, the flange portion 100A has to be formed and the fluid path 102 has to be formed in the flange portion 100A. So, even when it is attempted to grip and rotate the lipsticks 201 to put them into their cases by the gripping heads as shown in FIG. 4, the rotation is not possible because it is blocked by the joint 106 fixed to the fluid path 102 (see FIG. 5).