Robotic micromanipulators
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Robotic micromanipulators are fundamental tools to manipulate microscopic objects from microparticles, microfibers, biological cells, micro-organisms, MEMS components, and more. During the past decades, we have developed different robotic micromanipulators in various forms.
The first one is a , the first soft parallel micromanipulator, developed together with former colleague Pasi Kallio. The robotic micromanipulator is actuated by three piezohydraulic actuators, each containing a centimeter-sized hydraulic chamber driven by a piezo disk actuator, where hydraulic fluid elongates or contracts a soft bellow. The three bellows of the actuators join at a mobile platform, creating 3 DOF motions. We have also developed the first, composed of two piezo stack actuators and two piezo double benders. The automatically controlled gripper can micro-objects and has been applied to inspect laser chips.
Recently, we have also developed the ultra-fast , a 3-DOF film-based, electromagnetically actuated, soft kinematic robotic micromanipulator capable of achieving speeds up to 2117 °/s and 2456 °/s in α and β angular motions, with corresponding linear velocities of 1.61 m/s and 1.92 m/s using a 4-cm needle end-effector, 0.54 m/s along the Z axis, and 1.57 m/s during Z-axis morph switching. The robot can reach ∼1.50 m/s in path-following tasks, with an operational bandwidth below ∼30 Hz, and remains responsive at 50 Hz. FilMBot also demonstrates high precision (~6.3 µm, or ~0.05% of its workspace) in small path-following tasks. Additionally, the robot also has a simple construction using inexpensive, readily accessible components, and is easy to replicate.
Selected publications:
- Yu, J., Bettahar, H., Kandemir, H., and Zhou, Q., "", IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2026.
- Yu, J., Bettahar, H. and Zhou, Q., "", In 2025 International Conference on Manipulation, Automation and Robotics at Small Scales (MARSS 2025), pp. 1-6, 2025.
- Zhou, Q., Korhonen, P., Laitinen, J. and Sjövall, S., "", Journal of Micromechatronics, 3(3-4), pp.359-387, 2006.
- Zhou, Q., Korhonen, P., Chang, B. and Sariola, V., "", In Proceedings of 2005 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics, AIM 2005, pp. 534-539, 2005.
- Kallio, P., Lind, M., Zhou, Q. and Koivo, H.N., "", In Proceedings of 1998 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 1998, Vol. 2, pp. 1823-1828, 1998.