Research on Vacuum Micro-Gripper of Intelligent Micromanipulation Robots

This paper presents a new vacuum micro-gripper (as an actuator of the micromanipulator) for using in micro-assembly tasks. The gripper is able to pick and place 100-300um sized targets. The micro-gripper consists of a vacuum unit and a control unit. With a proportional valve as a pressure adjuster and a pressure sensor as a pressure detector, the vacuum unit has a simple structure. With a PC as the upper layer controller and a MCU as the bottom layer controller, the control unit has two-layered control architecture. The necessary conditions to realize pick, hold and place operations are derived by comparing the forces acting on micro-targets. For solving the difficulty of place a micro-target, a controller based on fuzzy logic is designed to control the working pressure accurately. With MATLAB's Fuzzy Logic Toolbox, simulation experiments are performed to validate the performance of the fuzzy PD controller