Hardware-based, Trajectory-Controlled Visual Servoing of Mobile Microrobots

Visual servoing based on camera or microscopic feedback has become a widely acknowledged technique for the positioning of robots. With a hardware-based image processing and tracking architecture, classic timing downsides such as low update rates, latency and jitter can be bypassed making visual servoing efficient. Applying this tracking to mobile nanohandling robots, a compact high-performance micro- and nanopositioning system is realized. Trajectory control becomes feasible due to the deterministic timing behavior of the position tracking as well as the reliable open-loop control of the robots. Measurement results demonstrate the excellent characteristics of the CMOS camera-based tracking system, the mobile nanohandling robots and the trajectory-controlled positioning. Although initially aimed at coarse positioning, the system achieves accuracies below 1 ±m.