Design and Analysis of a Piezoelectric-Actuated Symmetric Compliant Microgripper

Precise and stable operations in micro-manipulation and micro-assembly require high-performance microgrip-pers. To enable predominant static and dynamic characteristics, a novel piezoelectrically actuated compliant microgripper is designed and analyzed in this paper. The microgripper realizes a large gripping stroke through displacement amplification using the integration of a compliant bridge mechanism, an L-shaped mechanism, and a levered parallelogram mechanism. Optimization technology based on response surface is applied to generate a microgripper with sizeable gripping stroke and high natural frequency. The influence of structural parameters on microgripper performance is studied, and critical structural parameters are determined by the optimization. Finite element analysis method has been applied to verify the performance of the designed microgripper. Results show that the microgripper can grasp micro-objects with the maximum jaw motion stroke of 298.6 µm and natural frequency of 825.91 Hz. The microgripper proposed in this paper is expected to complete the operation task of micro-manipulation.