Construction and Experimental Simulation of a Tethered MEMS-Based 3 DOF Silicon Micro Robot

An experimental campaign has been completed over a flexible manipulator which has been built in Expanded PVC by means of laser cutting. The geometry of such compliant mechanism has been developed on the basis of a new flexural hinge design concept. This flexible mechanism has also the same geometry of a MEMS based 3 DOF (degrees of freedom) compliant micro robot, which has been constructed in silicon by means of standard micro lithography and other MEMS Techniques. The flexible laser cut mechanism has dimensions one order of magnitude greater than the silicon MEMS micro manipulator. As a matter of fact, the laser cut flexible mechanism has a maximum overall size equal to about 80 mm and represents a scaled model for the MEMS based silicon micro robot, which has typical overall size down to 3 mm. The construction of the scaled mechanism has allowed to make easier the experimental campaign. The hardware is composed of many actuators and sensors, in particular by a micro actuator and a web cam, for the digital acquisition of the mechanism motion. The software has been independently developed, by the research group, in LabVIEW diagram block environment and MatLab programming language. The experimental campaigns have been designed to test the functionality of the system and the accuracy of the pseudo-rigid-body models.