Description and performances of a four-degrees-of-freedom piezoelectric gripper

The aim of the research conducting to this paper was to design a simple, efficient and cheap microrobot, with a view to mass production. The devised microprehensile microrobot on chip (MMOC) is able to grip, hold and release submillimetric-sized objects. It is a two-fingered micro-gripper, with fingers able to move independently one from each other in two orthogonal directions. The gripper thus has four degrees of freedom. The paper describes the functioning principle of the MMOC and details its elementary piezoelectric actuator, which is compared to existing piezoelectric tubes. The realised prototype is then presented and its performances are commented.