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