Robotics in Micro-manufacturing and Micro-robotics

Development of a Design Methodology for Cloud Distributed Control Systems of Mobile Robots

“…Currently, open-source robotics (OSR) platforms have been created for the development of mobile robot control systems, which provide the unified drawings, diagrams, software and infrastructure for implementing the final ideas of third-party developers. Open platforms include RepRap [7,8], FarmBot [9], Yale Open Hand Project [10], e-puck mobile robot [11], Ardumower [12], Hexy [13], OpenROV [14], Pulurobotics [15], Thymio [16], Vorpal the Hexapod [17], Open-source Micro-robotic Project [18], Oscar [19], AnyWalker [20,21], drones such as ArduPilot [22,23], OpenPilot [24], LibrePilot [25], Paparazzi Project [26], Slugs [27], PX4 autopilot [28], humanoid robots such as iCub [29], DARwln-OP [30], InMoov [31], Poppy-project [32], DoraBot [33], NimbRo-OP [34], r-One [35], personal assistants such as Autobed [36], etc.…”

Polymer-based actuators: back to the future

“…There are examples of actuators based on shape memory alloys, piezoelectric ceramics, electroactive polymer (EAP) actuators -including electronic actuators and ionic actuators-, magnetoactive, electrostatic and ferrofluids [8]. In recent years, polymer- based actuators are gaining increasing attention due to their tunnability: polymer materials can be soft and hard depending on their chemical and physical structure that allows the design of soft actuators for handling soft living tissues (for example) and hard actuators useful for handling heavier materials [1,9].…”

Nonlinear modeling and tracking control of a single-link micro manipulator using controlled Lagrangian method

“…According to the characteristic of length scale, microrobotics is used widely for biological applications, mainly biotechnology (cells localization, particles separation, chromosome cutting or even genetic manipulation) in several works (Riviere et al, 1998;Tan and Ng, 2001;Imura et al, 2002;Ang et al, 2004) and also for a large number of micro-manufacturing applications (Cohn et al, 1998;Kim et al, 2005;Zhu and Tan, 2002). Many of these applications have arisen with the growth of the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) (Ghayesh et al, 2013) market, such as microassembly, which can be defined as the assembly of micro-products, where the main goal is the construction of a micro-structure by means of several microcomponents under microscopic tolerances (Tarazon, 2010). Some good examples of micro-assembly of MEMS can be found in Dechev et al (2003) and Karjalainen et al (2004).…”