Modeling and Experimental Validation of a Planar Microconveyor Based on a 2 × 2 Array of Digital Electromagnetic Actuators

A critical component of the highly packaged and automated environment of the microfactory is its transportation system. It needs to be autonomous, flexible, precise and, crucially, easy to integrate given the compact and dense nature of the microfactory. In this article, we present the modeling and experimental validation of a digital actuator array used as a stick-slip microconveyance system. This array is based on a modular and scalable design of a 2 ×2 matrix of electromagnetic digital actuators working in open-loop collaboration to perform planar conveyance tasks while being easy to integrate. A dynamic model of the array was developed and compared with experimental measurements of the mobile parts kinematics, unidimensional and bidimensional conveyed object displacements. The experimental measurements were taken with a dual camera setup-one for the position measurements of the conveyed object and a high-speed camera at 15 kHz for the kinematics of the mobile parts of the actuators and conveyed object. From the experimental tests, we measured a minimum and maximum object displacement step of 7.9 and 204.5 μm, respectively. The minimum rise time of the digital actuator was 0.8 ms. The bidimensional movements of the object demonstrated the planar motion capacity of the array, with generated angles from 1°to 88°. The dynamic model achieved a good correlation with the experimental measurements of the mobile part of the actuator as well as the conveyed object. The open-loop control performance of our digital actuation system suggests an interesting alternative to the conveyance systems for the microfactory.