Structure design of a new compliant gripper based on Scott-Russell mechanism

This paper presents the structure design and analysis of a novel compliant gripper based on the Scott-Russell (SR) mechanism. An SR mechanism in combination with a parallelogram mechanism enables the achievement of a pure translation of the gripper tips, which is attractive for practical micromanipulation and microassembly applications. As compared with traditional pure-translation grippers, the reported SR-based one exhibits a simple structure as well as compact dimension due to the full use of the in-plane space. The kinematics model of the gripper mechanism is established and finite-element analysis simulations are carried out to verify the structure design. The results not only demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed SR-based gripper design but reveal a promising performance of the gripper when driven by a piezoelectric stack actuator. Moreover, several variations of the gripper structure are presented as well.