Vision-Based Control of a Scratch Drive Microrobot

The newly organized RoboCup Nanogram competition challenges teams of students and researchers to construct microscopic untethered robots that will compete against each other in soccer-related agility drills on a 2.5 mm times 2.5 mm playing field. With dimensions in the measured in tens or hundreds of micrometers and masses measured in nanograms, these microrobots can be controlled with visual feedback from an optical microscope. This paper proposes a vision-based control strategy.