Capillary Pick-and-Place of Glass Microfibers

Microfibers are key components in construction of fiber-based materials, biomimetic microsensors, and other microstructures. Due to the scaling law, adhesion forces such as van der Waals force or electrostatic micro world play a more dominant role than gravity, causing difficulties precise pick-and-place objects. In this paper, we propose capillary force-based method for handling microfibers. The combines typical robotic transportation technique gripping achieve fast accurate We quantitatively analyzed critical conditions pick-up placement microfibers validated experimentally. theoretical analysis indicates that both largely dependent on contact length fiber angle meniscus substrate. experimental results show can be reliably picked up from placed substrate different materials including paper tissue, glass, silicon, stainless steel, copper with droplet volume 0.1 nL 0.3 nL. further applied super hydrophilic-super hydrophobic grooves studied its speed accuracy. demonstrated microfiber less seconds, linear accuracy $10~\mu \text{m}$ angular 0.5°. proposed is simple, it especially suitable fragile flexible sized objects materials.