Micromanipulation, communication and swarm intelligence issues in a swarm microrobotic platform

Rapid advancements of both microsystem technology and multi-agent systems have generated a new discipline, arising from the fusion of microrobotics technologies and of swarm intelligence theories. Microrobotics contributes with new capabilities in manipulating objects in the microscale and in developing miniaturized intelligent machines, while swarm intelligence supplies new algorithms allowing sets of simple robotic agents to solve complex tasks. A microrobotic swarm that is able to collectively achieve a cleaning task in an arena has been developed. This paper presents a novel platform for microrobotic swarms with the goal to apply swarm intelligence results to practical micromanipulation tasks and describes in details two main features of the platform: an optical communication strategy between the microrobotic agents, in order to share information and to coordinate swarm actions, and a micromanipulation technique–based on electrostatic phenomena–which can be performed by each microrobotic agent.