Design of compliant gripper for surgical applications

This article presents a novel design of monolithic compliant grippers for surgical applications. Compliant mechanisms are jointless mechanism and overcome the major traditional issues such as wear, friction and assembly error. Performance of compliant mechanism depends on the elastic body deformation to transmit motion between the linkages. In this article, the proposed gripper is designed with three different parts with different intended functions: tilting actuator, linear actuator and gripping jaws. Gripping jaws are developed to cut through shearing and collect tissues. A linear actuator transmits the input force to the gripping jaws. A tilting actuator tilts the whole gripper up and down to increase the shear force to cut the tissues. A conceptual mechanism is developed using topology optimisation for these concepts independently. Later, these parts are assembled and developed as a final solid model using SolidWorks. The structural performance of the gripper is investigated thoroughly using finite-element method.