A novel compression-based compliant orthogonal displacement amplification mechanism for the typical actuators used in micro-grasping

[Display omitted] •Inspired by the stress stiffening geometrical nonlinearity, the conceptional design of a novel compression-based compliant orthogonal single-stage displacement amplification mechanism is proposed, which can not only realize orthogonal movement transformation and displacement amplification without requiring bidirectional symmetric input forces/displacements, but also obtain increasing displacement amplification ratio with the increase of input force.•Using Castigliano's second theorem and the pseudo-rigid-body model, the feasibility of conceptional design is discussed.•Based on finite difference method and Euler–Bernoulli beam theory, the nonlinear modeling of displacement amplification ratio is presented, which proves that the displacement amplification ratio of proposed mechanism increases with the input force.•Finite element analysis and experimental test are conducted to verify the performances of proposed mechanism. Transforming movement orthogonally and enlarging grasping stroke simultaneously is a key issue in micro-grasping. In this paper, a novel compression-based compliant orthogonal single-stage displacement amplification mechanism (DAM) is proposed, which can not only realize orthogonal movement transformation and displacement amplification without requiring bidirectional symmetric input forces/displacements, but also obtain increasing displacement amplification ratio with the increase of input force. Inspired by the stress stiffening geometrical nonlinearity, the structural design of proposed DAM is presented, and the feasibility of conceptional design is discussed. Based on finite difference modeling and Euler–Bernoulli beam theory, the nonlinear analysis of displacement amplification ratio is presented. Finite element analysis (FEA), including the small deflection-based static FEA, nonlinear buckling FEA, as well as static FEA considering geometrical nonlinearity is used to verify the performance of proposed DAM. Finally, experimental verification is conducted.