Miniature Compliant Grippers with Force-Sensing

This paper is concerned with the manipulation of biological cells with miniature grippers that can also measure forces. We have designed three single-piece, compliant miniature grippers with parallel and angular jaw motions. Two grippers were designed intuitively while the third one was designed using topology optimization with implicit manufacturing constraints. These grippers were fabricated using different manufacturing techniques as well as with different materials. We present a visionbased force-sensing method by solving Cauchy’s problem in elasticity. In this work, the gripper was used to hold a yeast ball of less than 1 mm in diameter and forces involved there in were estimated to be about 30 mN. The force-sensing technique was validated at the macro scale where there was an independent method of estimating the forces using spring arrangement.

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