Abstract — This paper presents a new driving principle for microrobotic platforms whose actuation mechanism is based on two centripetal force actuators. The driving principle results to a controlled motion with precision of a few microns and is suitable for manipulation tasks. The drivers generate an appropriately selected sequence of pulsed actuations resulting in successive microsteps with high repeatability. Simulation results are presented and are compared with experimental results that demonstrate the displacement of a cantilever monitored by a video-microscope. The paper also presents an overview of the hardware assembly process giving emphasis on the integration of the electronic systems and demonstrating the simplicity of the design and the hardware integration process. Index Terms—Micro mechatronic device, micromanipulation, vibration-driven actuation. I.

Abstract—In this paper, a novel haptic tele-manipulation environment is presented. This includes an interface between a master haptic mechanism and a slave mechatronic mechanism for biomedical operations. The novelty stems from the fact that the environment’s slave is a micromechatronic device driven by two inexpensive centripetal force vibration micromotors. 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. The environment employs three input modes and two force control phases, which are described in detail. The haptic telemanipulation environment is illustrated by several examples. These show that, while the interaction between the haptic mechanism and the vibration driven device is complicated, the micromanipulation of the device can be successful and appear to the operator as simple. Index Terms — Haptics, micro mechatronic device, micromanipulation, vibration-driven actuation.

Abstract — In current robotics research there is a vast body of work on algorithms and control methods for groups of decentralized cooperating robots, called a swarm or collective. These algorithms are generally meant to control collectives of hundreds or even thousands of robots; however, for reasons of cost, time, or complexity, they are generally validated in simulation only, or on a group of a few tens of robots. To address this issue, this paper presents Kilobot, a low-cost robot designed to make testing collective algorithms on hundreds or thousands of robots accessible to robotics researchers. To enable the possibility of large Kilobot collectives where the number of robots is an order of magnitude larger than the largest that exist today, each robot is made with only $14 worth of parts and takes 5 minutes to assemble. Furthermore, the robot design allows a single user to easily operate a large Kilobot collective, such as programming, powering on, and charging all robots, which would be difficult or impossible to do with many existing robotic systems. I.