Soft-computing control of piezo walking microrobots

PLIF (Piezo Light Intelligent Flea) are a family of walking three legs microrobots, two legs are moved by means of piezo ceramic bimorph actuators, while the third is only passive. These robots are very small (2 cm X 2 cm) and very light (few grams) but at the same time relatively fast (20 cm/s) with the capability to move with very small steps (few microns). In the paper three different type of PLIF are described and some measurement performed with a camera are reported in order to identify the dynamical behavior of the robots. The dynamic measures pointed out that is very difficult to control these systems because of the high uncertainties in the interactions between the legs and the surface. Then a soft-computing approach for the control of such systems has been proposed by using infrared detector as sensors on the robots.