Computer Vision Based Control System of a Piezoelectric Microrobot

Micromanipulation and micro-assembly represent a field of technology that is gaining more and more importance. Performing microoperations manually with special tools like tweezers is very time intensive and exhausting. The precision of the human hand is also very limited. Therefore, it is of great interest to automate such processes. At the University of Karlsruhe, a microrobot with piezoelectric actuators was developed. It is able to move over long distances and to position its manipulator with an accuracy of about 1 μm. Possible applications of this flexible robot are the assembly of microsystems and the handling of biological cells. This paper presents the sensor concept and the vision based control system of this robot.