Abstract. Some of the artificial intelligence (AI) methods could be used to improve the performance of automation systems in manufacturing processes. However, the application of these methods in the industry is not widespread because of the high cost of the experiments with the AI systems applied to the conventional manufacturing systems. To reduce the cost of such experiments, we have developed a special micromechanical equipment, similar to conventional mechanical equipment, but of a lot smaller overall sizes and therefore of lower cost. This equipment can be used for evaluation of different AI methods in an easy and inexpensive way. The methods that show good results can be transferred to the industry through appropriate scaling. This paper contains brief description of low cost microequipment prototypes and some AI methods that can be evaluated with mentioned prototypes.