As mechanical end-effectors, microgrippers enable the pick–transport–place of micrometer-sized objects, such as manipulation and positioning of biological cells in an aqueous environment. This paper reports on a monolithic MEMS-based microgripper with integrated force feedback along two axes and presents the first demonstration of forcecontrolled micro-grasping at the nanonewton force level. Th...

In this paper, modeling and control strategies for a new observability-optimized piezoelectric microactuator are presented. The targeted applications concern mainly the design of microgripper for micromanipulation tasks. The device has been designed using a topological optimization method, which takes into account the optimal full integration of piezoelectric actuating and sensing elements with...

Microtools that will be useful for the positioning and investigation of biological microstructures must operate under biologically relevant environments, such as cell culture media or blood plasma. They must also be comparatively strong, and preferably allow a muscle like mode of movement. This is given by a novel family of actuators based on conjugated polymers (like polypyrrole, PPy). By mini...

A novel MEMS-based electrostatic actuator design is proposed for recording head fly height control below 10 nm. Different from prior work on MEMS-based electrostatic microactuators designed for magnetic hard disk drives (HDD), the proposed microactuator is fabricated monolithically with a conventional head/slider design. The actuator is micromachined into the same side as the head element on a ...

This paper investigates manipulation tasks with arrays of microelectromechanical structures (MEMS). We develop a geometric model for the mechanics of microactuators and a theory of sensorless, parallel manipulation, and we describe e cient algorithms for their evaluation. The theory of limit surfaces o ers a purely geometric characterization of microscale contacts between actuator and moving ob...

A decoupled control design structure and discrete time pole placement design method are proposed for MEMS-based dual-stage servo control design in magnetic disk drives. Dual-stage track following controllers are designed using a decoupled three-step design process: the voice coil motor (VCM) loop design, the microactuator (MA) inner loop design, and the MA outer loop design. Both MIMO (when the...

This paper reports a novel large vertical displacement (LVD) microactuator that can generate large piston motion and bi-directional scanning at low driving voltage. A LVD micromirror device has been fabricated by using a unique deep reactive ion etch (DRIE) post-CMOS micromachining process that simultaneously provides thin-film and single-crystal silicon microstructures. The bimorph actuation s...

In this work we report on microactuators and microgrippers fabricated from SOI (Silicon On Insulator) wafers by a surface and bulk micromachining fabrication technology. The main advantages of this technology are: a) large thickness of the devices (10 μm up to 40 μm) resulting in devices which are stable against disturbing forces perpendicular (z-direction) to the ground plate. b) the small num...

In silicon surface micromachining, anhydrous HF GPE process was verified as a very effective method for the dry release of microstructures. The developed gas-phase etching (GPE) process with anhydrous hydrogen fluoride (HF) gas and alcoholic vapor such as methanol, isopropyl alcohol (IPA) was characterized and its selective etching properties were discussed. The structural layers are P-doped mu...