A novel thermomagnetic gripper

To date, magnetic actuating becomes an important research topic in robot technology. Moreover, the magnetic actuating has a great potential to be used in biomedical/medical engineering such as magnetic-manipulating small bio-objects. To achieve the small-objects manipulation, some researchers demonstrated magnetic grippers. In general, the grippers consist of two arm-structures and a magnetic material fixed on each arm. Because of the magnetic moment in the magnetic material, applying external magnetic field to the gripper induces a magnetic force or torque. Consequently, the magnetic force or torque deflects two arms of the grippers. Eventually, the deflected arms contact each other. If there are objects in the gap between the arms, the object is grasped by the arms. This achieves the small-objects manipulation by the magnetic grippers. However, in the case of individual-manipulation of numerous objects (especially when the researchers try to individually manipulate each of the objects at the same time), researchers have to use numerous grippers and individually apply an external magnetic field to each gripper to grip each object. Due to this, the gripping becomes complicated and impractical. To address this issue, an alternative magnetic-gripping approach is needed. More recently, some researchers demonstrated novel thermo-magnetic energy harvesters and switches which alternatively cooling/heating these devices can enable a magnetic-force-interaction and thus move the moveable structure of the devices. We believe this thermal-magnetic-mechanical converting approach can be modified to demonstrate a novel thermomagnetic-based individual-gripping. Hence, in this paper, we present a novel thermo-magnetic gripper. Through applying an electrical local heating/cooling to the gripper, the gripper can be individually controlled to grasp an object.