A new design of piezoelectric driven compliant-based microgripper for micromanipulation

This paper describes the development of a microgripper mechanism capable of delivering high precision and fidelity manipulation of micro objects. The mechanism adopts a flexure-based concept on its joints to address the inherent nonlinearities associated with the application of conventional rigid hinges. A combination of two modeling techniques namely Pseudo Rigid Body Model (PRBM) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) was implemented to expedite the prototyping procedure which leads to the establishment of high performance mechanism. A wire Electro Discharge Machining (EDM) technique was utilized to fabricate the monolithic structure of the gripper mechanism. Experimental studies were conducted on the model prototype to obtain various correlations governing the gripper performance as well as for model verification. The experimental results demonstrate a high level of integrity in comparison to the computational analysis. A high amplification characteristic and maximum stroke of 100 μm can be achieved.