A MEMS microgripper with changeable gripping tips

Customization of manipulation tools for manipulating different-sized objects can be time consuming and costly. To improve flexibility, this paper presents a microgripper design with changeable tool tips. A microfabrication process for constructing arrays of compliant tool tips and a friction based assembly strategy were developed, which effectively overcame existing difficulties in miniaturizing modular gripper designs to sub-micrometer scale. In-situ tool tip change was demonstrated inside a scanning electron microscope (SEM) for gripping objects that vary in size by two orders of magnitude (15μm to 100nm) with a single microgripper body. The assembly process takes approximately one minute to complete inside SEM, and the disassembly process only takes a fraction of a second.