Experimental verification of design automation methods for robotic finger

•Introducing a generic experimental method to verify finger design automation approaches.•Proposing methods to examine stability and performance of fingers.•The proposed experimental method is applied on fingers designed by existing finger design automation methods.•Results are comprehensively analyzed and compared.

Design automation of industrial grippers is a hot research topic for robot industries. However, literature lacks a standard experimental method to enable researchers to validate their approaches. Thus, this paper proposes a generic experimental method to verify existing finger design approaches. The introduced method is utilized to validate the methods Generic Automated Finger Design (GAFD), Manually Designed Fingers (MDF) and the eGrip tool. Experimental results are compared and the strengths and weaknesses of each method are presented.