Mobile Microrobot Platform for Advanced Manufacturing Applications
The goal of this research thrust is to create a flexible, micro-scale additive manufacturing platform utilizing a team of untethered micro-scale robots and modular, multifunctional building blocks to create smart micro-devices and structures. Externally applied magnetic fields are commonly used for the power and actuation of individual magnetic mobile microrobots. However, in order to achieve different behaviors from individual robots within a team of microrobots, there must be either significant variation in their design or in the magnetic control signals applied to each microrobot. We are currently working on a novel approach to create a specialized magnetic potential field generating substrate from MEMS-fabricated planar microcoils and the related control methodology to enable truly independent control of multiple mobile microrobots.
Grants: ONR, NSF
Students: Sagar Chowdhury, Bixing Yan, Peter Jaron, Archit Agarwal
Collaborators: Michael Zavlanos (Duke)
Selected Publications
- D. Cappelleri, D. Efthymiou, A. Goswami, N. Vitoroulis, M. Zavlanos, “Towards Mobile Microrobot Swarms for Additive Manufacturing”, International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, Accepted.