Abstract
A robotic wire gripper for gripping segments of sheathed electrical wire and presenting them to a splicing or welding machine includes a comb-like clamping wall structure with parallel longitudinally extending and transversely spaced clamping walls forming releasable jaws to grip wire segments near pre-stripped ends. A controllable actuator linearly moves the clamping walls in the transverse direction. A robot arm carries the comb-like structure and actuator. A controller causes controlled raking of pre-stripped wires aligned in a row into respective passageways, reduces spacing between walls to grip the wires, and simultaneously extracts all wires from a holder, thereby stripping the wires as the sheath is retained in the holder. The robot arm then presents the still-gripped, longitudinally aligned wire segments to a splicing or welding machine.