Compliant gripper with integrated position and grasping/interaction force sensing for microassembly

摘要

A compliant gripper with integrated position and force sensors dedicated to automated micro-assembly tasks. The gripper possesses a larger gripping range with a bidirectional drive, and is capable of detecting grasping force and environmental interaction forces in horizontal and vertical axes. The gripper has a compliant rotary flexure bearing. The gripper further has a compliant mechanism with two-stage stiffness designed to provide force sensing with dual sensitivities in two measuring ranges to accommodate the grasping of objects with different sizes. The dual-sensitivity, dual-range force sensor provides finer and coarser force sensing in a small and large ranges, respectively. Analytical models are derived to predict the grasping range, force sensing sensitivities, and force measuring ranges. These models are verified by conducting finite-element analysis simulations.