Robotic micromanipulation: a) actuators and their application

Abstract

Development of biotechnology and technologies related to small size object position and placement in working area, ensuring desired orientation and fitting during movement into prescribed positions. Paper provides an effort to classify and provide a sorted list of applications in the variety of existing robotic systems to manipulate the object of micrometric size. Extensive development of robotic systems fosters intensive request of accurate and fast drives for robots and manipulators. Paper overviews and specifies a broad spectrum of micrometric scale drives, operating under certain physical effects. These drives are analyzed according to their physical domain, movement mode, stroke or angle range, generated force, speed of movement and other essential drive parameters. The paper concludes a high potential of drives development and points direction to future their application possibilities in microrobotics.

Robotic micromanipulation: b) grippers for biological objects

“…Electrostatically actuated microgrippers operate by applying a high voltage to the jaw opening/closing actuator, that pull or push arms one in relation to the other using Coulomb forces [4]. The properties of implemented actuators highly influence the general design of microgrippers and the efficiency of their operating (Table 1).…”

Supplementation of synthetic object replicas for increasing precision of microrobot trajectory keypoints

“…Computer vision in micro-robotics [1] is a challenging task as images and video streams in such settings are usually low resolution and may prove difficult to be used for identifying objects of various classes [2], [3]. Furthermore, the gathering of real yeast cell images can be a difficult and very time-consuming task as it includes the preparation of yeast solution and manual acquisition of data in a controlled environment [4].…”