SAT-C: An Efficient Control Strategy for Assembly of Heterogeneous Stress-Engineered MEMS Microrobots

Abstract

We present a new efficient control framework for controlling groups of heterogeneous stress-engineered MEMS microrobots for accomplishing micro-assembly. The objective is to maximize the number of controllable microrobots in the system while keeping the number of external global signals as low as possible. This work proposes a theoretical control strategy that could complete multiple-shapes microassembly from arbitrary initial configuration where all the control primitives can be accompanied with a constant number (O(1)) of control pulses of the power delivery waveform. We focus on microrobotic systems that can be modeled as nonholonomic unicycles. We validate the control policy with hardware experiments for implementing planar assembly using multiple macroscale robots with direct drive wheels. These results lay the foundation for developing new methods to control of a large number of MEMS microrobots.