Design and analysis of a compact compliant microgripper with bidirectional linear actuation

This paper proposes the design of a new compliant microgripper for application in microassembly tasks. One of the uniqueness of this gripper is that it possesses a large grasping range with bidirectional drive. It also enables the measurement of the gripping force by the force sensing arm. To realize this function, the gripper structure is designed based on leaf flexures which supply a linear guiding. The finite-element analysis (FEA) simulation demonstrates the effectiveness of the gripper parameter design, which are determined by the analytical models. The FEA result reveals that the presented gripper structure can provide the large displacement bidirectional gripping operation as well as force sensing to ensure the safety of the objects without damaging.