Case Study: Harvestance achieves 80% lighter, two‑day delivery vacuum grippers with Markforged composite 3D printing

Developing and Designing Vacuum Grippers for Production Line Robots

Harvestance, a design and engineering services company focused on additive manufacturing, needed lightweight, strong, and easily customizable vacuum grippers for collaborative robots. Conventional CNC‑machined aluminum grippers were heavy (often 1–2 kg), limited robot payloads, required lengthy lead times and costly customization, and introduced pneumatic tubing interference—so Harvestance selected Markforged and its composite 3D printing technology (Mark Two, Onyx One, FX20 with Onyx, Continuous Carbon Fiber, and Fiberglass) to address these challenges.

Using Markforged printers and materials, Harvestance redesigned grippers with integrated vacuum channels, one‑touch fittings, and continuous fiber reinforcement to eliminate external tubing and reduce post‑processing. With Markforged, they achieved about an 80% weight reduction (gripper bodies of ~85–430 g), cut delivery from two weeks to two days, sped up large-tool production 3–4× with the FX20, and met required strength and surface‑finish standards—enabling scalable, certified, and competitively priced gripper solutions.

Harvestance

Seungjae Leem

CEO