Combination of vision servoing techniques and VR-based simulation for semi-autonomous microassembly workstation

Remote control of microrobotic workstations dedicated to microassembly of hybrid MEMS consisting of several separate components are necessary. The operator controls the motion of the microrobots remotely on the motion level. In the future view of industrial applications, these approaches are not suitable. We proposed a concept of a desktop micro device factory for task-level remote control using the combination of vision servoing techniques and virtual reality (VR) environment. It is composed of two micromanipulators equipped with micro tools operating under a light microscope. First, we present the cooperation control strategy of the micro handling operation under vision-based position/force control integrating a sensor fusion framework approach. A guiding-system based on virtual micro-world exactly reconstructed from the CAD-CAM databases of the real environment being considered is presented for the imprecisely calibrated micro world. Finally, some experimental results of microassembly tasks performed on millimeter-sized components are provided.