The arm gets the attention, but the end effector decides whether the cell works. Four questions sort the options faster than any catalogue.
Start from the part, not the gripper
Weight, surface, stiffness and how the part arrives — loose in a bin, oriented in a tray, hanging on a hook — narrow the field before any hardware discussion. A crushed carton or a scratched face tells you the gripper was chosen from a datasheet instead of from the part.
Fingers or vacuum: decide on the worst part
Parallel fingers hold their grip through fast moves and rotations; vacuum wins on sealed surfaces it must not mark and on flat parts with nowhere to grip. Make the decision against the worst part in the mix — the dented carton, the oily casting — because that is the one that will stop the line at two in the morning.
Budget wrist weight like money
Every gram at the flange comes out of the payload budget, and heavy tooling slows acceleration long before it hits the payload limit. A lighter gripper with application-specific fingertips usually beats a universal unit that spends half the payload on its own body.
Plan the change before it is needed
Product families change, and the second format arrives sooner than expected. Tool changers, standard finger patterns and spare cup positions cost little at design time and turn a format change into an afternoon instead of a redesign. Ask the integrator how the next part variant will be handled — the answer reveals how the cell was engineered.
