Design, fabrication and testing of a 2 DOF compliant flexural microgripper

This paper presents the development of a monolithic two degrees of freedom (2 DOF), piezoelectric actuated microgripper for the manipulation of micro-objects. Micromanipulation and microassembly are the major subjects of interest in recent times and are becoming increasingly important in many domains. An effort is being made to develop a novel 2 DOF microgripper, each jaw being able to move independently to grasp and rotate objects of micro sizes. Microgripper is developed based on the compliant mechanism. The designed 2 DOF compliant microgripper is modeled using FEM and PRBM approach further validated experimentally. The microgripper is actuated using APA 120-S piezoelectric stack actuators. The displacement of the microgripper and the gripping force is measured by image processing technique using LabVIEW tools. The microgripper is subjected to various tests to measure the displacement amplification ratio and micromanipulation experiments. Wire of various sizes are used to test the grasping and rotating sequence of the microgripper. The theoretical, simulation and experimental results reveal the good performance of the microgripper.