Capillary Force Gripper for Complex-Shaped Micro-Objects With Fast Droplet Forming by On-Off Control of a Piston Slider
Wataru Hagiwara, Takatoshi Ito, Kenta Tanaka, Ryota Tokui, Ohmi Fuchiwaki
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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ral2019_capillaryforcegr,
title = {Capillary Force Gripper for Complex-Shaped Micro-Objects With Fast Droplet Forming by On-Off Control of a Piston Slider},
author = {Wataru Hagiwara and Takatoshi Ito and Kenta Tanaka and Ryota Tokui and Ohmi Fuchiwaki},
booktitle = {RA-L 2019},
year = {2019}
}