A Novel Miniature Mobile Robot System for Micro Operation Task

Micro operation assisted by miniature mobile robot system has become a research hot in robotics and micro operation domain. In this paper, a newly developed micro operation oriented five D.O.F. (degrees of freedom) miniature mobile robot system is presented. By comparing it with other miniature robot systems, the main improvements of this design are macro/micro dual driven, embedded hardware, wireless power supply and wireless communication Hereinto, development of a mobile robot with dual motions is the first challenge and the main original contribution. Two miniaturized brushless DC motors drive the macro motion, which realizes faster motion of the robot. Micro motion, which realizes precision positioning of the robot, is driven by four piezoelectric-actuators and four electromagnetic foots based on inchworm principle. To guide the robot accomplishing micro operation automatically, an external visual sensor system with CCD cameras and optical zoom microscopes is designed. And the details of robot control architecture are explained. Experiments show that the proposed robot system succeeds in providing micro operation task such as micro part gripping, convey and assembly.