Abstract: Micro force measurement is required as following more complicated micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) in its micro-assembly and micro-manipulation. According to the requirements of integrated vision-based navigation and micro-force sensing for a micro-gripper, a kind of vision-based compliant structural force cell is presented oriented to the micro gripper. The force-sensing cell is designed in the idea of integration of a force-sensing cell with a micro-gripper, which embeds the characteristics of monolithic structure, easy machining, vision-based navigation and gripping force sensing in a same vision field. After the idea of micro-gripper integrated with the force sensing cell is presented, a vision-based force sensing cell is built up by the following works that the function of loading force with the displacement is derived, and a precision displacement measurement method based on speckle digital image correlation (DIC) is formulated. The experimental setup based on a amplified model of a compliant structural force sensing cell also is built up in order to verify the relationship between its force and displacement. The results indicate that the performance of the vision-based compliant force cell reaches the expected requirements.

Key words: Compliant structure, Digital image correlation, Force sensing