Stiffness characterization and mechanical manipulation of rigid or flexible micro objects using compliant devices are investigated in this paper. Compliant devices are themselves elastically deformable objects. By using the material properties, geometry, and measured deformations of the compliant devices, the force and deflection of the manipulated object are computed using geometrically nonlinear mechanics formulations. Thus, the stiffness of any given object is characterized. Since the input and output points might be occluded, we have developed an alternate approach where displacement measurement at other points can be used to estimate the forces at input and output points. This new technique also helps reduce the effect of errors in optical capturing of deformations in the computation of forces. By virtue of this vision-based force measurement, we can apply controlled force on the objects, which is a very useful feature in micro assembly and manipulation where excessive force might damage the object. Additionally, we demonstrate manipulation with compliant devices utilizing vision-guided position and force control. illustrative examples at micro and macro size scales are included.
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