Universal concept for fabricating arbitrary shaped μIPMC transducers and its application on developing accurately controlled surgical devices

This paper presents a novel micromachined method for fabricating micro-sized ion polymer metal composite (IPMC) devices with arbitrary shapes and demonstrates the technique to develop tiny accurately controlled surgical devices. This technology is beyond current state-of-the-art approaches in manufacturing large-scale IPMC devices, and provides a universal solution to construct micro-size- featured IPMC transducers with fine contours and no short-circuits. To demonstrate the usefulness of the method, hand-shaped grips for laparoscopic operation are designed, fabricated and tested. The fabricated device with the dimension of 6 mm times 6 mm times 80 mum shows that it could reach a displacement of 300 mum at the location 1 mm away from the anchor when a 0.5 Hz square wave of 12 Volts is applied, and a maximum instantaneous force of 5 mN output when it is driven with a 0.5 Hz square wave of 6 Volts.