Design of a Vision Based Compliant Gripper for Medical Tools
Design of a Vision Based Compliant Gripper for Medical Tools from Dayana Hijaz
Design of a Vision Based Compliant Gripper for Medical Tools

This project was the final year project of my senior year in undergrad at the American University of Beirut (AUB). I was part of a team of 4 persons. Our project aimed to design and build a compliant gripper that could be mounted on a manipulator. The robot which consisted of the custom universal gripper secured on a Rhino manipulator utilized computer vision and inverse kinematics to identify and grasp medical tools and hand them to the surgeon.
The team was awarded the certificate of creative achievement for the project.

My responsibilities in the project focused on the design and test of the end effector gripper:
- Identified the design parameters
- Performed initial mechanical hand sketches
- Designed 3D Solidworks model
- Extracted 2D dimensioned technical drawings for the manufacturing stage
- Oversaw the manufacturing of the gripper in the AUB shops
- Tested the performance of gripper on 10 different tools



Initial hand sketched mechanical drawing of the end effector gripper inspired by the design of a shower head. Shown also on the drawing is the latex balloon filled with the coffee granules - essence of the universal gripper's gripping mechanism.
3D Solidworks drawing of the end effector gripper. Shown on the left is the assembly of the 3 subcomponents and on the right the exploded view.
2D view of the bottom section of the gripper with smart dimensions.
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2D views of the top section of the gripper with smart dimensions.
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2D views of the middle section of the gripper with smart dimensions.
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On the left: picture of the Rhino Robot Manipulator with letters to identify each joint. On the right: Model of the kinematics of the Rhino Robot Manipulator on Mathematica.
Testing the Gripper's performance on 10 different objects. Some balloons ruptured during the experiments due to high pressure, strain, fatigue, and stress concentration. Therefore, balloons made out of sturdier materials should be used rather than latex. Success rate varied depending on the object size, surface area, and roughness.
Testing the Vision and Kinematics system on 3 objects and concluded a 100% success rate.
Picture showing the robot handing the picked-up tool to the user.
Demo Day Poster.
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Demo Day Presentation.
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Design of a Vision Based Compliant Gripper for Medical Tools

This project was the final year project of my senior year in undergrad at the American University of Beirut (AUB). I was part of a team of 4 persons. Our project aimed to design and build a compliant gripper that could be mounted on a manipulator. The robot which consisted of the custom universal gripper secured on a Rhino manipulator utilized computer vision and inverse kinematics to identify and grasp medical tools and hand them to the surgeon.
The team was awarded the certificate of creative achievement for the project.

My responsibilities in the project focused on the design and test of the end effector gripper:
- Identified the design parameters
- Performed initial mechanical hand sketches
- Designed 3D Solidworks model
- Extracted 2D dimensioned technical drawings for the manufacturing stage
- Oversaw the manufacturing of the gripper in the AUB shops
- Tested the performance of gripper on 10 different tools



Dayana Hijaz
ME Product Design Graduate at UC Berkeley Berkeley, CA