Founding:

French National Research Agency: 2005-2008 ANR Program.

Dec. 2005 - Nov. 2008

The micro-products assembly in the fields of bio-medical devices, clock components and opto-electronics is performed manually. The development of an automatic micro-assembly cell allows reducing the cost of these products.

Now, the reduction of the current automatic assembly methods is limited by the scale-effect. In fact, automatic, reliable and repeatable micro-assembly devices are not developed under a scale limit around 100 micrometers. Under this physical limit, electrostatic effects and adhesion effects are predominant compared to the weight or the micro-objet inertia. The significant perturbations induced by electrostatic and adhesion effects make the current assembly methods invalid in this scale.

The aim of this project is to propose new automatic micro-assembly methods. We focus our study on micro-objets which characteristic dimension is from 1 to 100 micrometers. Our proposed innovative approach is to perform micro-assembly tasks in a liquid. In fact, perturbation effects are less important if micro-objects are submerged than if micro-objects stay in a dry medium (air or vacuum).

The use of a liquid medium induces specific scientific problematics. This project is divided in four sub-projects :

- SP1: - Micro-objects dynamics in liquid medium and innovative micro-assembly methods

- SP2: - Resources and components of a micro-assembly cell

- SP3: - Perception and control strategies

- SP4: - Modular structure, integration and demonstrator