Design of a novel asymmetrical piezoelectric actuated microgripper for micromanipulation

In high precision micromanipulation task, microgripper is an important tool which directly affects the quality and efficiency of micro-object manipulation. This paper presents the design of a novel asymmetrical microgripper with just one jaw movable, which is driven by a stack piezoelectric ceramic actuator (SPCA). The main body of microgripper is compact flexure-based mechanical structure with a three-stage amplification which consists of a leverage mechanism, a bridge type mechanism and a parallelogram leverage mechanism. Based on the three-stage amplification, large and robust jaw displacements and parallel jaw grasping can be realized. The kinematic, static and dynamic analyses of the developed microgripper are carried out based on both Pseudo-rigid-body (PRB) model and finite element analysis (FEA). The results show that the microgripper exhibits good performance.