Design, fabrication and control of a planar, non-redondant, MEMS digital microrobot.
With the current expansion of micro- and nano-technologies (in such domains as watchmaking, electronics, optics, biomedical, . . .), came the necessity to build systems able to manipulate and make the assembly of smaller and smaller objects. Design of robotic stations, able to manipulate micro-objects, expanded all over the world, making use of high resolution actuators and numerous sensors adapted to the microworld. This thesis opens a new paradigm in the design of micromanipulation robotics. We present the design, modeling, fabrication and control of a new microrobot, the DiMiBot (Digital MicroroBot). It is the first digital microrobot -- inspired from digital electronics -- which makes use of binary actuators for the generation of discrete displacements with high accuracy without any sensors (open-loop control). These highly repeatable and robust binary actuators (bistable modules) generate an accurate displacement of 25 μm. They are monolithically conbined with a parallel flexible architecture, allowing the generation of a discrete workspace, in which all the 2N (N is the number of bistable modules used) distinct reachable positions are perfectly stable, repeatable and mechanically robust. They are evenly spread inside a 10.5 μm length square. After dimensioning, the first digital microrobot prototype in silicon was microfabricated in MIMENTO clean-room of FEMTO-ST institute. This DiMiBot has 4 bistable modules and generates a workspace of 3.5 μm resolution with 90 nm repeatability.