Optimal design of a novel micro-gripper with completely parallel movement of gripping arms

This paper presents the optimal design and analysis of a microgripper which has absolutely parallel movement of the gripping arms when it grasps or releases micro objects. By employing a compact displacement amplifier and several flexure supporting hinges, a novel gripper with simple symmetric structure driven by piezoelectric actuators has been designed. The kinematics and dynamic modeling of the gripper are conducted by resorting to compliance and stiffness analysis based on matrix method. The safety factor of the gripper is analyzed and conducted. Radius basis functional network (RBFN) is used to solve the analytical equations. At last, the parameters are optimized via RBFN based multi-objective GA optimization method, a set of optimal solutions can provide with good suggestions for parameters selections.