Design and Experimental Validation of a Hybrid Micro Tele-Manipulation System

This paper presents analytical and experimental results on a new hybrid tele-manipulation environment for micro-robot control under nonholonomic constraints. This environment is comprised of a haptic telemanipulation subsystem (macro-scale motion), and a visual servoing subsystem, (micro-scale motion) under the microscope. The first subsystem includes a 5-dof (degrees of freedom) force feedback mechanism, acting as the master, and a 2-dof micro-robot, acting as the slave. In the second subsystem, a motion controller based on visual feedback drives the micro-robot. The fact that the slave micro-robot is driven by two centrifugal force vibration micro-motors makes the presented tele-manipulation environment exceptional and challenging. The unique characteristics and challenges that arise during the micromanipulation of the specific device are described and analyzed. The developed solutions are presented and discussed. Experiments show that, regardless of the disparity between master and slave, the proposed environment facilitates functional and simple micro-robot control during micromanipulation operations.