Development of A Robotic Microassembly System with Multi-Manipulator Cooperation

Due to scaling effects robotic assembly of micron-sized parts is quite different from the macro one. Poorly understood mechanisms of micromanipulation and unpredictable effects of microphysics present a great challenge to perform complex 3D microassembly operation with high precision. This paper introduces an experimental microassembly system with multi-manipulator cooperation. The workcell consists of two 4 DOF master micromanipulators and one 3 DOF slave micromanipulator. Two kinds of micro end effectors, vacuum gripper and piezoelectric-bimorphs tweezer, are developed to handle micro parts under stereo microscopic vision monitoring. A semi-autonomous microassembly strategy is investigated with human-robot task plan interaction and sensor-based control approaches. The prevalent operation by microassembly workcell is introduced and the accomplished experiment demonstrates the system executes micro parts assembly reliably and availably