A Parasitic Motionless Piezoelectric Actuated Microgripper for Micro/Nano Manipulation

Abstract

This paper presents an asymmetric design of piezoelectric actuated microgripper for micro-objects handling. The microgripper offers parasitic motionless linear motion of the gripper jaw. The design integrates a bridge-type mechanism and parallelogram mechanisms in such a way that a pure linear motion of the gripper jaw in the grasping direction can be achieved. The analytical modeling is developed to find the output displacement, the displacement amplification ratio, and the natural frequency of the mechanism. Finite element analysis (FEA) is conducted to verify the results obtained from analytical modeling. The FEA results show that a jaw displacement of 353 µm with a displacement amplification ratio of 17.65 can be achieved. The parasitic motion can be reduced to 0.012 % of the gripper jaw motion in the x-direction. The modal analysis shows that the first natural frequency of 207.81 Hz can be achieved. The minimum safety factor of the design is 6.06, which ensures the microgripper can perform a repeated task.