From MMVLWiki

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 (https://cordis.europa.eu/search/index.cfm?fuseaction=proj.document&PJ_RCN=2306861) 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 (https://vision.eng.shu.ac.uk/jan/Miniman-PublicFinalReport-print.pdf).

Partners

Members from Uppsala (https://www.mst.material.uu.se/), St. Ingbert (https://www.ibmt.fhg.de/), Pisa (https://www-mitech.sssup.it/), Barcelona (https://www.ub.es/), Karlsruhe (https://microrobotics.ira.uka.de/) (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) (https://www.research.philips.com/) from Eindhoven and Kammrath & Weiss GmbH (K&W) (https://www.kammrath-weiss.de/) from Dortmund were involved as industrial partners.

See Also

• MiCRoN
• Nanorobotics

External Links

• IPR microrobotics Wiki (https://microrobotics.ira.uka.de/)
• Official MMVL Miniman page (https://www.shu.ac.uk/mmvl/research/past-projects/research-past-MINIMAN.html)
• Miniman public final report (https://vision.eng.shu.ac.uk/jan/Miniman-PublicFinalReport-print.pdf)
• Prototypes (https://wwwipr.ira.uka.de/~microbot/microrobs.html)