Presentation, force estimation and control of an instrumented platform dedicated to automated micromanipulation tasks

This paper presents a platform used to measure micromanipulation forces. The main interest of the proposed platform is that it uses classical force sensors with limited range and adapts these sensors to that of micromanipulation forces. The proposed platform, and an additional micropositioning device, are afterwards used to develop a micromanipulation system. To automate this system, we design two control levels. First, an internal loop with a PID controller is employed to improve the micropositioning device's performances. Then, an external loop based on an incremental control law is implemented to control the force. The automated system is finally used for the micromanipulation task on rigid and non-rigid micro-objects.