The design of optimum gripping systems for robotic assembly tasks is non-trivial. Traditionally, production engineers have been in charge of this task. Their involvement, however, should be minimised in a modern computercontrolled manufacturing environment. This paper presents a fully automated gripper design system. The system receives the CAD models of the components to be assembled, identifies their geometric structures, determines their dimensions, groups them in families and then generates the best gripping system capable of handling them during the assembly. The paper also gives an example of the application of the system to a simple gripper design problem.