Design of micro-hand with two magnetic levitated fingers

Abstract

A micro-hand with two fingers was designed and a prototype of one finger subsystem with three degrees of freedom was developed to show the validity of the design. The finger is constrained with a 3-DOF link mechanism and is directly driven with three pairs of electromagnets. Friction of the mechanism is negligibly small so that force control is easily realized by regulating the currents of the magnets. The performance of the prototype was evaluated by the application to micro drawing.