Development of Multi-Scalable Microhand System with Precise Motion Ability

Abstract

Numerous types of microhands have recently been designed to perform micromanipulation tasks that are crucial for micromachine assembly, microsurgery operations and biological cell analysis. Because most current microsystems are task-specific, the realization of a general-purpose microhand that is compatible with a wide range of applications is necessary. There are two problems to be solved in order to realize a general-purpose micromanipulation system however. First, creating a large workspace with high resolution in which to grasp multisized microobjects is still a challenging feature for available microhands. Second, precise motion throughout a large workspace for the transportation of microobjects in the limited space of a microscope is another arduous task. In this study, we propose a microhand system that achieves multiscalability, i.e., a large workspace with precise positioning for the grasping and transportation of multisized microobjects. This system has been designed with an optimized parallel mechanism in which the manipulability of different-sized microobjects is improved from 1–45 µm to 1–132 µm. The proposed rough-to-fine motion strategy that allows us to achieve a large range with high resolution positioning ability for performing the transportation task moreover minimized error from 17 µm to 0.18 µm.