<title>Design and control of flexible microrobots for an automated microassembly desktop station</title>

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in performing microsystem assembly using flexible microrobots. A new concept of a flexible robot-based micro-assembly desktop station and tow prototypes of piezoelectric microassembly robots, MINIMAN and PROHAM, were already presented at the last year's SPIE meeting. In this paper, the motion control approach of these robots is discussed. This control approach is based on the geometric description of the robot platform and aims at following the optimal motion trajectory to minimize the operation time and to keep the robot end effector under microscope supervision. Besides excellent abilities both robots have some disadvantages such as the relatively high drive voltage of the piezoactuators or the instability of grasp-and-hold operations. For this reason, several new piezoelectric microrobots that employ different locomotion and object handling principle have lately been developed. The design and functions of these microrobots are shown.