Development of Haptic Microgripper for Microassembly Operation

In recent times, dimensions of consumer products have decreased, with components sizes ranging down to micrometers/nanometers. In case of microproducts that are produced in low-medium quantities with many variants, the automation of their assembly process may not be economically profitable. On the other hand, the purely manual approach is not sufficient to fulfill the task with high efficiency since a human operator has limitations for the force and precision requirements. In order to overcome these difficulties, tele-haptic micro-assembly systems are a promising approach. One of the bottlenecks on the development of such a system is the micro-gripper, which should be able to perform pick-and-place of micro-objects with diverse sizes and sense the grasping force. In this work, a developmental effort to build a mechanical micro-gripper capable of sensing grasping force and transferring these forces to the human operator using a 1-DOF master device is presented. Experimental results concerning pick-and-place of micro-objects are demonstrated.