Gripping with low viscosity fluids

Abstract

At Fraunhofer IPA various adhesive grippers have been developed. The gripper's main features are high flexibility regarding shape, size and material of the units handled. Furthermore adhesive gripping provides a very accurate centring effect as well as a compliance effect.

Unified View of Robotic Microhandling and Self‐Assembly

“…The same is true for microhandling technology. If we check carefully the existing microhandling technologies, it should be possible to find that such combination of the components of robotic microhandling and self-assembly does exist already in the literature, for example, centering using capillary forces [7], capillary-force-assisted releasing [14], snaplocking [13,40], and centering using electrostatic forces [27]. This is also natural because researchers are always trying to solve the technical problems using all the available means.…”

Capillary Gripping and Self-Alignment: A Route Toward Autonomous Heterogeneous Assembly

“…Passive release strategies exploit environmental conditions like surface features to reduce adhesive forces between gripper and component [16][17][18][19][20]. Active release strategies employ specific gripper actions [10], notably the modification of gripper curvature [21], change of meniscus pressure by gas injection [22]. We previously reported an integration process based on topographical surface structuring via laser patterning for accurate capillary self-alignment of plastic electronic devices [23].…”

Microassembly using water drop

“…This method is characterized by combining surface tension with negative pressure produced by vacuum, which is different from the approach by Bark et al (1998). The aim of this method is to assemble µm-order electric components with mounting machines having common positioning accuracy.…”