Industrial Tools for Micromanipulation

Abstract

This chapter synthesizes the state of the art of the industrial tools for micromanipulation in two major fields of application: the scientific instrumentation and the manufacturing. The first major market for microrobotics is to enable operations on microsamples with a better precision than the human hand. The second market or microrobotics consists in providing robots that are able to assemble microcomponents to produce complex microsystems. Industrial robots are designed to copy human gestures whose accuracy is limited to a few tenths of micrometers. In the micromechanism industry, most assembly tasks to build miniaturized products are performed by hand by highly qualified operators. A micromanipulation and microassembly machine consist in a microgripper and vision tools integrated in a high-precision robotic structure. These three key elements are detailed here: microgrippers, high-resolution vision system and integrated assembly platform.