Assembly of planar structures by parallel actuation of Mems microrobots

Abstract

Parallel motion and cooperation of multiple microrobots has many potential applications, including microassembly. In this paper, we present designs, theory and the results of fabrication and testing for an untethered multi-microrobotic system of stressengineered MEMS microrobots that implements a novel microassembly scheme. Our work constitutes the first implementation of an untethered, mobile multi-microrobotic system. The robots are designed such that multiple devices can be independently maneuvered using a single, global control signal. We used a novel stress-engineering fabrication process to build 15 microrobots and used these to demonstrate microassembly of five types of planar structures from two classes of initial conditions. The final assemblies matched their target shapes by 96% (average), measured as the percentage of the area of the target shape covered by the assembled structure.