Developing a control software for a miniaturerobot-based micromanipulation system

Multiple robot-based micromanipulation system is a very interesting term in the field of micro operation research recent years. A type of piezoelectric driven miniaturerobot was introduced and the corresponding micromanipulation system was designed. The robot was controlled directly by a computer with the help of an analog output card NI PCI-6723 and the real-time situation of the working area was obtained as feedback information by a CCD camera to the computer through a video capture card Winfast vc100 xp. Hence a control software which could fulfill these two tasks were basically discussed in this paper. A fundamental process of generating desired electric signals using DAQmx driver software was proposed, after which several methods of capturing video stream from the camera in OpenCV Library, an open source computer vision library widely used, were studied. The sampling rates of them were compared and CCameraDS Class was chosen for programming the software, which was proved feasible in the implementation process.