A preliminary study on a novel automatic method for angular displacement measurements in microgripper for biomedical applications

In recent years, the demand for biomedical devices based on MEMS (Micro-electro-mechanical systems) technology has been grown rapidly. Considering the requests that must be met by these devices, such as high accuracy and precision, low costs and consumption, low response times and the possibility of working in aggressive environments such as the human body, studies on metrological and functional characterization of these devices are in order to improve their performance by actively participating in the optimization of prototypes. This study is part of this context, which presents a SURF (Speeded Up Robust Features) - based automatic software for measuring the angular displacement of a comb- drive of a prototype of microgripper for biomedical applications. The main sources of uncertainty have been estimated and the data have been compared with the results obtained by another previously developed semi-automatic inhouse software. From the present study it emerged that the presented software can be considered the one best suited to the functional characterization of this class of microgripper for biomedical applications, thanks to reduced computational costs and the absence of dependence on the operator respect to the semi-automatic software previously adopted.