A Magnetic Wheel Structure for an Omni-Directional Microrobot to Limit Slip Effect

Abstract

To fulfill the microassembly work successfully, an omnidirectional mobile microrobot is presented. To finish the micron size task, the positioning precision of the robot is highly important. But some unpredictable factors, especially the slip effect in wheel, would affect the precision of the robot and cause unwanted deviation. To limit the deviation and optimize the positioning performance of the robot, a new wheel structure is designed. The design of the new wheel is based on magnetic principle while considering the potential problems brought by the magnetic units. With nonlinear dynamic analysis with slip of the microrobot and simulations based on it, the slippage effect is shown to be limited a lot with the application of new wheel structure. And following experiments are executed to verify the optimization brought by the magnetic wheel structure.