Analysis and Experiments of a Haptic Telemanipulation Environment for a Microrobot Driven by Centripetal Forces

Abstract

This paper presents the analytical and experimental results on a new haptic telemanipulation environment for microrobot control. The proposed environment is comprised of a 5DOF force feedback mechanism, acting as the master, and a 2DOF microrobot, acting as the slave. The fact that the slave microrobot is driven by two centripetal force vibration micromotors makes the presented telemanipulation environment exceptional and challenging. The unique characteristics and challenges that arise during the haptic micromanipulation of the specific device are described and analyzed. The developed solutions are presented and discussed. Several experiments show that, regardless of the disparity between the master and slave, the proposed environment facilitates functional and simple microrobot control during micromanipulation operations.