Abstract
In this letter, we describe the newly proposed capillary force gripper that combines fast water refilling via the capillary phenomenon and fast droplet forming via the on-off control of a piston slider. The capillary force is suitable for capturing and releasing heterogeneous and complex-shaped micro-objects because it is one of the most dominant forces in the microscopic world and acts on any shaped objects by the water flexible deformation. However, a water droplet easily evaporates and loses during every pick-and-place operations. To solve this problem, we developed a gripper that can quickly form droplets with simple control. In the experiments, we confirm that the gripper can generate a sufficient capillary force to grip a 1-mm3 micro-object for over 100 s. Furthermore, we realize the automatic pick-and-place of cube, cone, and semicylinder samples. We compare the positioning errors among them to discuss the feasibility, future prospects, and applications in electronics and MEMS fields.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 8758789 |
| Pages (from-to) | 3695-3702 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Oct 2019 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Assembly
- automation at micro-nano scales
- grippers and other end-effectors
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Control and Systems Engineering
- Biomedical Engineering
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Mechanical Engineering
- Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
- Computer Science Applications
- Control and Optimization
- Artificial Intelligence