We began building MEMS grippers in early 2019 as part of the DARPA SHRIMP program. SRI International won a DARPA SHRIMP grant to build a centimeter-cube-size robot that could compete in a series of microrobot “olympics” challenges (e.g., lifting and stacking weights), and our group was subcontracted to build a gripper: tiny robot hands (SRI would build the remainder of the robot).

Originally, most of the work was done by postdoc Wei Li. Starting in late summer 2020, the work was taken over by most of the MEMS graduate students Craig Schindler, Hani Gomez, Dillon Acker-James, and Daniel Teal (Dillon and Daniel were new to the group, so this served as an introduction to the project).

As of spring 2020, we had built a 14x9x0.6mm gripper that could move a jaw with 15mN of force and could lift a 1g brass weight.

However, DARPA SHRIMP was discontinued in late spring 2020. Since then, Daniel Teal has continued working on the project because the gripper is a simple system and an ideal platform for testing a number of new MEMS construction techniques.