It has been a long held dream by man to one day be free of the drudgery of the manual labour through the use of automatic devices. Needless to say, this vision always depends on the technical components available at that time.

The robot is an important handling machine which roughly reproduces the human arm. In order to be effective, it also requires mechanical hands, which are generally referred to as grippers. These are also required on pick-and-place devices and a wide range of other automatic systems.

For the user, it is becoming increasingly difficult to take in the now wide range of gripper technology. This is the reason why this brief introduction has been published. Above all, it is intended to provide ideas to practical users, since the selection of the right gripper is by no means a trivial task.