Workshop: Automation of Assembly and Packaging at the Micro/Nano-scale 
August, 2011

Motivation


Micro and nanotechnologies have attracted the intention of engineers and researchers within the two last decades. The starting point mainly concerned the design and development of miniaturized mechanisms, actuators and motors dedicated to high resolution positioning.

Since ten years ago, having developed miniaturized and high resolution actuators, engineers and researchers have been starting to develop more advanced systems that are able to perform tasks (teleoperated) such as micromanipulation and microassembly (etc) based on these actuators. In parallel, the use of microfabrication processes for the development of smaller and smaller functional strcutures have been raising.

These last five years have been particularly focused on the study of control of systems working at the micro/nano-scales. The aim is to go towards the automation of complete cells, stations or factories working at these scales. The success of such final goal is based on several aspects that have to be studied a priori: control of each actuator, measurement aspect, study of the physics of the micro/nano-world, etc. The spirit of previous workshops and tutorials (see below) lied on these intermediary issues which differ from the spirit of the proposed workshop. In this workshop, the focus is the complete automation. Survey, recent results and new issues on this aspect are presented.

Below are the latest workshops/tutorials concerning micro/nanotechnologies that were presented within these last years at IEEE-ICRA and IEEE-CASE.




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