Dr. Igor Paprotny
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley
BSAC Postdoctoral Researcher
April 14, 2009 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 521 Cory Hall, Hogan Room
Host: Richard White
The talk will encompass Dr. Paprotny's doctoral research on parallel control of stress-engineered MEMS microrobots. Designs, theory and the results of fabrication and testing for a novel parallel microrobotic assembly scheme will be presented. The robots are 240-280 microns by 60 microns by 7-20 microns, and each robot consists of a curved, cantilevered steering arm mounted on an untethered scratch drive actuator (USDA). The robot receives a signal via a capacitive coupling with an underlying electrical grid (called the operating environment) which powers the USDA and controls the robot's motion. The operating environment is designed to couple the same power and control signals to all operating microrobots. Consequently, only a single global signal can be used to maneuver multiple stress-engineered microrobots within the same operating environment. Control algorithms that allow multiple microrobots to be maneuvered independently (while implementing microassembly) via a single power and control signal will also be presented. The scalability of the approach will be discussed and novel theoretical results that allow maximization of the number of simultaneously controllable stress-engineered MEMS microrobots within the same operating environment will be shown. The designs and fabrication for four independently-controllable microrobot species will be presented and how these species were used to demonstrate microassembly of several (five) different types of planar microstructures. The robots achieved an average docking accuracy of 3 micrometers with a 96% average match between the assembled and the target structures.
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