Kavraki Lab

Physical and Biological Computing

Keywords:

Abstract:

Orienting parts that measure only a few micrometers in
diameter introduces several challenges that need not be
considered at the macro-scale. First, there are several
kinds of sticking effects due to Van der Waals forces and
static electricity which complicate hand-off motions and
release of a part. Second, the degrees of freedom of
micro-manipulators are limited. This paper proposes a pair
of manipulation primitives and a complete algorithm that
addresses these challenges. We will show that a sequence of
these two manipulation primitives can uniquely orient any
asymmetric part while maintaining contact without sensing.
This allows us to apply the same plan to many (identical)
parts simultaneously. For asymmetric parts we can find a
plan of length O(n) in O(n) time that orients the part,
where n is the number of vertices.