A Visual Guided 4 D.O.F Miniature Robot System for Micro-Handling Purpose

A visual guided 4D.O.F miniature robot system is presented. The highlights of the robot are macro/micro dual driven motion mode, embedded hardware, all time visual servoing, wireless power supply and wireless communication. With the macro motion mode, the robot is a typical wheeled mobile robot, which is driven by two small size brushless DC motors. With the micro motion mode, based on the principle of inchworm, the robot can move freely with micron resolution. To guide the robot accomplishing micro-handling task automatically, an external visual sensor system is designed. The visual system includes two parts that are global visual system and local visual system. The global visual sensor is a CCD camera mounted vertically to detect pose of the robot in image space, and guides end-effector of the robot gripper to the view- field of optical microscope. The local visual system, which consists of optical microscopes and CCD cameras, provides the micron resolution information for the robot. Experiments show that the proposed robot system is effectively in providing micro- handling task.