2D Planar Micro Manipulator by Stack-Integrated Micro Actuator/Sensor Array

In this paper, we present a versatile planar manipulator composed of a stack-integrated arrays of microactuators and sensors. In this system, a transparent actuator array chip of 16 x 16 cells is stacked on a photo sensor array chip of the same cell size as the actuator array (1.5mm x 1.5mm). Each cell of the actuator array has four orthogonal thermo-bimorph actuators of 500μm in length, 100μm in width and 6μm in thickness. The system can manipulate an object by XY planar positioning (planar conveyance) as well as by posture (i.e. direction of an object) control (rotational conveyance). These manipulations are performed by feedback controls of actuators based on the information from sensor arrays. Especially, in this paper, we focus on the posture control (rotational conveyance) of the system, because this function is indispensable for the manipulation (not just conveyance) of objects. An experimental result shows the rotation of 180 degrees in 33 seconds with the feedback operation of the system.