Electrostatically driven microgripper integrated piezoresistive force sensor

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and application of an electrostatically driven microgripper integrated piezoresistive force sensor. The microgripper is designed to manipulate two microobjects at the same time with force sensing ability. Surface and bulk micromachining technology is employed to fabricate the microgripper from single crystal silicon wafer. The end effector of the gripper is a four arms structure, two fixed cantilever beams integrated with piezoresistive sensor are designed to sensing the gripping force, and an electrostatically driven microactuator is designed to provide the force to operate the other two movable arms. In this way, the four fingers structure enables the gripper to grasp two samples with different sizes at the same time. Experimental results show that it can successfully provide force sensing and play a main role in preventing damage of microparts in micromanipulation and microassembly tasks.