Jenelle Armstrong Piepmeier

This describes the application of a visual servo control method to the microrobotic manipulation of polymer beads on a two-dimensional fluid interface. A microrobot, actuated through magnetic fields, is utilized to manipulate a non-magnetic polymer bead into a desired position. The controller utilizes multiple modes of robot actuation to address the different stages of the task. A filtering strategy employed in separation mode allows the robot to spiral from the manipuland in a fashion that promotes the manipulation positioning objective. Experiments demonstrate that our multiphase controller can be used to direct a microrobot to position a manipuland to within an average positional error of approximately 8 pixels (64 µm) over numerous trials.

Microrobots have a number of potential applications for micromanipulation and assembly, but also offer challenges in power and control. This paper describes an uncalibrated vision-based control system for magnetically actuated microrobots operating untethered at the interface between two immiscible fluids. The microrobots are 20 μm thick and approximately 100–200 μm in lateral dimension. Several different robot shapes are investigated. The robots and fluid are in a 20 × 20 × 15 mm vial placed at the center of four electromagnets. Pulse width modulation of the electromagnet currents is used to control robot speed and direction. Given a desired position, a controller based on recursive least square estimation drives the microrobot to the goal without a priori knowledge of system parameters such as drag coefficients or intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters. Results are verified experimentally using a variety of microrobot shapes and system configurations.

Microrobotics is a rapidly growing field with promising applications in microsurgery and microassembly. A challenge in these systems is providing power and control signals to the robot. This project explores crawling robots that are powered and controlled through a global mechanical vibration field. Structures within the robot will cause it to respond to particular frequencies with different motion modalities. A prototype, dubbed the “jitterbot”, was cut out of a 0.75 mm sheet of steel using electric discharge machining (EDM), and has a total footprint of approximately 30 mm × 20 mm in the xy-plane. The “robot” has a tripod body (8 mm × 16 mm) with three small legs, and two suspended masses that are designed for specific resonance frequencies. The robot was tested on a plate that was vibrated vertically at frequencies ranging from 20 to 2,000 Hz. For particular resonant frequencies, the robot moves forward and turns in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction. Finite element modeling confirms that the mechanism for motion is a rocking mode that is influenced by two arms that are suspended mass springs tuned to different frequencies. This lays the groundwork for further miniaturization.

This article presents experimental results for vision-based mobile robot control using a fixed camera. A commercially available vision system is used to identify the robot position and a moving goal position. With little a priori knowledge, the control method estimates the system model on-line and does not require calibrated camera or mobile robot parameters. Results demonstrating the control of two very different mobile robots using the same controller highlight the flexibility of the approach.