Design and Control Structure of a Miniature Robot for Micro Operation Task

A newly developed five D.O.F. (degrees of freedom) miniature mobile robot system is presented. It consists of a moving positioning module with macro/micro dual driven modes and a three rotational D.O.F. spherical micromanipulator module. With the macro motion mode, the robot is a typical wheeled mobile robot, which is driven by two small size brushless DC motors. With the micro motion mode, based on the principle of inchworm, the robot can move with micron resolution. To carry out micro operation process with the robot, a high/low-level style control system is designed. High-level control system is decision-making level, which consists of visual sensors and a host computer. Low-level control system is motion execution level, which is an embedded control system. Communication between the two levels is realized by using bluetooth wireless communication module, which is RS232C interface connector. Testing results of the robot and the micro operation experiment show that the proposed robot system has the characteristics of small cubage, low power cost, flexible motion and can be used in providing micro operation task