Electro-thermally actuated microgrippers with integrated force-feedback

Microfabricated grippers and tweezers are promising tools for manipulation of micro- and nanoscale objects. As with ordinary macroscale grippers, the ability to sense the forces involved in grabbing would be advantageous for controlling the operation as well as for measuring the mechanical properties of the grabbed object. A simple design is presented for an electro-thermally actuated microfabricated gripper capable of providing a piezoresistive read-out of the gripper deflection, which can be used to measure the forces applied to the grabbed object. Measurements of actuation of test devices are presented and found to be in reasonable agreement with expected values. Finally, piezoresistive measurements of the gripper deflection are demonstrated.