MINIMAN

Miniman III robot with 5 degrees-of-freedom gripper

Miniman III-2 robot with force-feedback gripper

Miniman 3 manipulating objects under a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM)

The MINIMAN project

The EU-Esprit Project No. 33915 Miniaturised robot for micro manipulation was carried out between Oct 1998 and Jan 2002.

Objective

The goal of the MINIMAN project was to develop smart microrobot with 5 degrees of freedom and a size of a few cubic cm, capable of moving and manipulating by the use of tube-shaped and multilayered piezoactuators.

• handling and assembly of micromechanical parts under a light microscope,
• handling and assembly of micromechanical parts in the vacuum chamber of a scanning electron microscope,
• grasping, moving and sorting of biological cells under a water-resistant optical lens.

The project is finished and you can download the report here (mirror).

Partners

Members from Uppsala, St. Ingbert, Pisa, Barcelona, Karlsruhe (project-leader), and Sheffield have participated in this project. The task of the Sheffield team was to develop computer vision software.

Furthermore Philips Research (PRLE) from Eindhoven and Kammrath & Weiss GmbH (K&W) from Dortmund were involved as industrial partners.

See Also

• Micron

External Links

• IPR microrobotics Wiki
• Official MMVL Miniman page
• Miniman public final report (mirror)
• Prototypes