A microrobot-based automated micromanipulation station for assembly of microsystems
The development of new types of miniaturized and microrobots with human-like capabilities play an important role in different application tasks. One of the main problem of present-day research is, for example, to assemble a whole microsystem from different microcomponents. This paper presents an automated micromanipulation desktop station including a piezoelectrically driven microrobot placed on the highly-precise x-y stage of a light microscope, a CCD-camera as a local sensor subsystem, a laser sensor unit as a global sensor subsystem, and a Pentium PC equipped additionally with an optical grabber. The microrobot has three piezoelectrically driven legs and two autonomous manipulators as endeffectors; it can perform highly-precise manipulations (with an accuracy of up to 10 nm) and a nondestructive transport (at a speed of several mm/s) of very small objects under a microscope. To perform manipulations automatically, a control system, including a task planning level and a real-time execution level, is being developed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All lights reserved.
microrobots microassembly automated desktop station assembly planning piezoactuators