Size-Adapted Manipulation Robots for Microassembly

Investigation and strategies for precision of miniaturized robots with micro gears

“…The robot, shown in Figure 4 is suitable for desktop factories and has a modular design consisting of two serial axes (Z, Ψ) and a plane parallel ( R RRR R ) robot arm structure (X, Y). The development of the Parvus is already described in previous articles of the authors (Burisch et al , 2007; Ellwood et al , 2011). The robot serves as exemplary device for the investigation of the miniaturized drive concept using micro harmonic drive gears.…”

“…The first impulse for desktop factories was given by MEL (Okazaki et al , 2002) in Japan with the estimation that a 1/10 size reduction of production machines could lead to a decrease of energy consumption of about 1/100 compared to a conventional factory. Nowadays, there are also a few examples in Europe of research and industry projects, such as the miniaturized robot Pocket Delta (Codourey et al , 2006), the robot Parvus (Burisch et al , 2007; Ellwood et al , 2011) described below, miniaturized environments such as factory cells (Sitala et al , 2010) or handling devices for nano objects from Klocke Nanotechnik GmbH (Klocke, 2001). A more detailed discussion of the state of the art for precision robots and desktop factories can be found in previous articles of the authors (Burisch et al , 2007, 2011).…”

“…The initially mentioned precision requirements and challenges for the use of the robot structure in an assembly task have been investigated by several precision measurements, which were introduced in Section 2.2. This analysis was done following the standard (EN ISO 9283, 1998) and is described in detail by Burisch et al (2007) and Ellwood et al (2011).…”

“…Experiments with a preloaded robot arm structure have confirmed this effect. A solution to optimize this behavior by angular preload of the robot arms has already been presented in Ellwood et al (2011).…”