Design of an underactuated compliant gripper for surgery using nitinol

An end-effector for robots or a surgical tool that can adapt itself to the grasped object would enhance the productivity and capabilities of the user. In this thesis, the development of an underactuated compliant gripper is presented. It can be used as the end-effector of an endoscopic instrument or a robot. It is a novel design optimized using as criteria recent theoretical advances presented in the field. Optimization procedures are required to obtain the geometry of the transmission mechanism because of its underactuated nature. A driving mechanism further incorporated to distribute actuation to both fingers of the gripper while aiming at managing the grasping of asymmetrical objects without requiring supplementary inputs is also discussed. Finally, the results of numerical simulations of the gripper with different materials are presented and discussed.