<title>Planning and control of a microassembly process in a flexible microrobot-based desktop station</title>

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in performing assembly of microsystems (i.e. non-destructive transportation, precise manipulation, and exact positioning of microcomponents) by flexible microrobots. A microrobot-based microassembly desktop station is being developed at the University of Karlsruhe. Several prototypes of piezoelectric driven microrobots and a design of the flexible microassembly desktop station were already presented at the last years' SPIE-meetings. In this paper, some implementation results of the station's planning and control system are presented. On the planning level, a common microassembly model for a computer-aidd assembly planning is suggested -which is based on geometric reasoning -and its components are discussed in detail. The feasibility criteria for the generation of feasible assembly sequences and the optimization criteria for selecting the optimal assembly plan are described. For stations employing several microrobots, a method for decomposition of an assembly plan is suggested. Since the station's microrobots are rather complicated systems, it is very hard to find a useful robot model for the control purposes. For this reason, control methods have to be used for positioning of a microrobot, which do not require an exact system model and which allow a reasonable compromise between the real-time processing and the exactness. An intelligent neural controller for positioning a microrobot has been developed.

Micro-manufacturing: research, technology outcomes and development issues

“…The development similar to the prototype-system reported stimulated a lot of the interest in this area. During the last fifteen years several demonstration miniature/micromanufacturing systems have been developed [62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80]. A review on micro-factory for micromanufacturing applications was presented in the literature [20].…”

Micro-forming and miniature manufacturing systems — development needs and perspectives

“…Dedicated development to microfactory applications included examples such as a micro-gripper using a two-way shape memory alloy (TSMA) [45] which is intended to cover a range of applications -from handling work of 5 mm diameter with more than 3 N gripping force to 1 mm in size with 59 mN gripping force, a flexible conveyer micro-robot with electromagnetic field-based friction drive control [46], etc. A micro-robot-based micro-assembly station was developed [47][48][49] which shows a good example of using mobile micro-robots in micro-assembly. In this system, mobile piezoelectric micro-robots with dimensions of a few cm 3 and with at least five dof can perform various manipulations either under a light microscope or within the vacuum chamber of a scanning electron microscope.…”

Robotic precision assembly system for microstructures

“…3–5 In addition, semi-automated assembly systems with vision and force feedback have been developed. 6–10 These assembly systems are characterized by low automation and low measuring precision.…”

“…[3][4][5] In addition, semi-automated assembly systems with vision and force feedback have been developed. [6][7][8][9][10] These assembly systems are characterized by low automation and low measuring precision. (b) Song Liu et al 11 developed an automatic system to realize the high-precision assembly of the parts in the millimeter scale.…”