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Updated: Feb 17, 2026
Rod-based Fabrication of Customizable Soft Robotic Pneumatic Gripper Devices for Delicate Tissue Manipulation
Published on: August 2, 2016
Design, characterization and control of thermally-responsive and magnetically-actuated micro-grippers at the
Federico Ongaro1, Stefano Scheggi1, Arijit Ghosh2
1Surgical Robotics Laboratory, Department of Biomechanical Engineering, University of Twente, 7522 NB Enschede, The Netherlands.
Abstract:
The design and control of untethered microrobotic agents has drawn a lot of attention in recent years. This technology truly possesses the potential to revolutionize the field of minimally invasive surgery and microassembly. However, miniaturization and reliable actuation of micro-fabricated grippers are still challenging at sub-millimeter scale. In this study, we design, manufacture, characterize, and control four similarly-structured semi-rigid thermoresponsive micro-grippers. Furthermore, we develop a closed loop-control algorithm to demonstrate and compare the performance of the said grippers when moving in hard-to-reach and unpredictable environments. Finally, we analyze the grasping characteristics of three of the presented designs. Overall, not only does the study demonstrate motion control in unstructured dynamic environments-at velocities up to 3.4, 2.9, 3.3, and 1 body-lengths/s with 980, 750, 250, and 100 μm-sized grippers, respectively-but it also aims to provide quantitative data and considerations to help a targeted design of magnetically-controlled thin micro-grippers.
