Design and Analysis of Closed-loop Controlled Parallel-Plate Electrostatic MicroGrippers

This work describes the design and analysis of a class of sub-millimeter scale grippers. These electrostatically-driven devices are fabricated from polysilicon using an IC-based surface micromachining process and have been designed to handle objects with dimensions in the range of 10 to 100 um. Manipulation of substantially larger objects (up to perhaps 1mm^3) should be possible with similarly designed grippers. The bulk of this work describes the nonlinear modeling, analysis, and simulation of the electrostatic microgripper, both with and without a stabilizing feedback controller. Measurements of the open-loop system are consistent with the system model. (This thesis, along with device layout and simulation files, is available by anonymous ftp from synergy.icsl.ucla.edu.)