Micron Scale Mobile Robotics
Event details
| Date | 11.04.2012 |
| Hour | 13:15 |
| Speaker | Prof. Metin Sitti, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Miniature mobile robots have the unique capability of accessing to small spaces and scales directly. Due to their small size and small-scale physics and dynamics, they could be agile and portable, and could be inexpensive and in large numbers if they are mass-produced. Miniature robots would have potential future applications in health-care, mobile sensor networks, desktop micro-manufacturing, environmental monitoring, and inspection. In this presentation, miniature mobile robots with tens or hundreds of micrometer overall sizes and various locomotion capabilities are presented. Going down to tens or hundreds of micron scale robots, significant challenges are on-board actuation and power sources. Two alternative approaches are proposed in this talk to solve this challenge. First, external powering and actuation methods are used to move permanent magnet micro-robotic bodies using a stick-slip dynamics, spinning or rolling based surface locomotion on planar surfaces in air or in liquid in 2-D. Vision-based control schemes can individually control single- or teams of micro-robots and these robots can manipulate and assemble micro-parts with or without contact in liquid. Controlled assembly and disassembly of such multiple magnetic micro-robots are also investigated and demonstrated towards reconfigurable micro-systems in 2-D. As the next approach, a hybrid (biotic/abiotic) actuation principle is used to propel micron scale robotic bodies in liquid by harvesting the flagellar propulsion of attached bacteria. Stochastic swimming of these S. marcescens bacteria attached micro-objects can be stopped and resumed repeatedly using chemical switching. Their motion can be steered using controlled chemical gradients in the liquid medium. Preliminary stochastic dynamics and steering of such bacteria propelled micro-objects are demonstrated by simulations and experiments.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Contact
- Schafer Isabelle <[email protected]>