Bilaterally controlled micromanipulation by pushing in 1-D with nano-Newton scale force feedback

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1276467 (Table of Contents)

In this thesis the focus is on mechanical micromanipulation which means manipulation of micro objects using mechanical tools. Pushing is a type of motion of the micro parts and pushing ability on micro scale is inevitable for many applications such as micro assembly of systems or characterization of tribological properties of micro scale things. The aim of the work in this thesis was to obtain an improved performance in 1-D pushing of micrometer scaled objects in the sense of giving more control to human operator where it allows human intervention via bilateral control with force feedback in nano-Newton scale. For this purpose a system which can practice 1-D pushing of micrometer scaled objects by human operator is built. A bilateral architecture which is composed of master and slave sides has been used in the system. The micrometer scaled object is pushed by the piezoactuator which constitutes the slave side and the master side is a DC motor where the shaft is turned by the human operator via a rectangular prism rod. This system can be considered as an improved system comparing with the ones in literature, since it has a number of different advantages together. One of them is the ability to calibrate the relation between the movement of the slave system and the cycle that is made by the DC motor shaft which is controlled by the operator. This gives the availability to decide how sensitive will the slave side motion be to the master side motion. Moreover, thanks to the nano-Newton scale force sensing ability of the system user has the chance to use this as a force feedback within the bilateral structure, where by the way the operator will understand when the piezoresistive cantilever beam touched the object that is going to be pushed by it. The operator also understands when there is an obstacle or opposite force that keeps the object from continuing on its track.