Caging grasps for micromanipulation & microassembly

In this paper, we demonstrate a systematic way to determine configurations for up to four coordinated micromanipulators to form caging grasps for transporting micro-scale planar, polygonal parts. We exploit the geometry of the part, noting the presence and location of convex corners and non-convex corners, and form opposing force equivalents with the micromanipulator probe tips around the micro-scale parts that define a caging polygon. We perform an error bound analysis for caging grasps derived in this manner and provide theoretical values of this bound for four micro-parts of interest. We demonstrate experimental results of the caging micromanipulation transport primitive using these feature-defined grasps and compare them with the expected error bounds. Finally, we combine this caging transport primitive along with rotational and one-sided-pushing motion primitives, to carry out a representative microassembly task.