Collaborative robots, the Universal Robots, Doosan, Techman and KUKA iiwa families, have made automation accessible to small and medium Australian manufacturers in a way the older industrial arms never did. What they do not come with is a gripper that fits the part on your line.
End-of-arm tooling, almost without exception, is custom. And because the cobot's payload includes the gripper, keeping that tooling light is critical. Additive manufacturing fits the brief almost perfectly, and a structured workflow keeps the design honest from concept to cycle-time validation.
The cobot integrator community in Australia has matured fast. What used to be a bespoke engineering project is now a repeatable process, and printed tooling sits at the heart of that maturity because nothing else can match its lead time, cost and design flexibility for low-volume custom geometry.
A typical EOAT design workflow
Most successful EOAT projects follow roughly the same five-step path from cycle-time target to a tool that runs reliably on the line.
Define the cycle-time budget, payload margin and target part envelope before drawing anything
Sketch a concept gripper around off-the-shelf vacuum cups, pneumatic cylinders or magnets to anchor the design in reality
Run a topology optimisation pass on the structural elements to strip non-load-bearing mass, often saving 30 to 50 per cent
Prototype in PA-CF or PA-GF from OzFDM, with TPU 90A pads bonded onto contact surfaces
Run a fatigue trial at full cycle rate before committing to a controlled production print recipe
Material decisions at each step
Carbon-fibre nylon dominates structural EOAT because of its stiffness-to-mass ratio. Glass-fibre nylon takes the impact-tolerant role for grippers that knock against fixtures during fast cycles. TPU at 90A to 95A shore hardness transforms gripping performance on irregular or delicate parts, and prints well alongside or bonded onto the rigid arm structure. For electronics handling, an ESD-safe variant of either nylon is non-negotiable. Our FDM service keeps all of these on the shelf for short-lead EOAT work.
Material choice also drives finish. A grip surface that touches food, pharmaceutical packaging or painted automotive panels needs a different polymer to one that picks raw castings off a foundry conveyor, and the right call early avoids an expensive redesign once line trials begin.
Topology tip
Resist the urge to optimise a part you have not yet validated. Build a chunky prototype first, prove the kinematics, then strip mass on the second revision.
Where quick-change interfaces save the shift
Modern cobots benefit greatly from quick-change wrist interfaces that let a single arm cycle through multiple EOAT configurations across a shift. The female half is usually a standard catalogue item; the male half, mounted on the EOAT, is almost always printed. Standardising that male interface across an EOAT family enables rapid changeover and consistent calibration, and the savings compound across thousands of cycles per week.
Most of our cobot customers settle on three or four standardised tool changes per cell, with the bare arm capable of running any of them inside a thirty-second exchange. The capital saved by not buying a second cobot tends to be ten times the cost of the printed tooling family.