PI force control of a microgripper for assembling biomedical microdevices

Abstract

Recent work is presented on the control of a microgripper based on flexure joints, fabricated by LIGA and instrumented with force sensors. The force sensors are semiconductor strain gauges which have been integrated in the microgripper and experimentally characterised. The microgripper is the core component of a workstation developed to grasp and manipulate tiny objects, such as components of biomedical microdevices. A proportional integral (PI) force control of the microgripper has been implemented. The results of the tracking experiments prove that this control algorithm can assure performance suitable for the intended applications.