High speed closed loop control of a dielectrophoresis-based system

Nanosciences have recently proposed a lot of proofs of concept of innovative nanocomponents and especially nanosensors. Going from the current proofs of concept on this scale to reliable industrial systems requires the emergence of a new generation of manufacturing methods able to move, position and sort micro-nano-components. We propose to develop ‘No Weight Robots-NWR’ that use non-contact transmission of movement (e.g. dielectrophoresis, magnetophoresis) to manipulate micro-nano-objects which could enable simultaneous high throughput and high precision. This article deals with a control methods which enables to follow a high speed trajectory based on visual servoing. The non-linear direct model of the NWR is introduced and the calculation of the inverted model is described. This inverted model is used in the control law to determine the control parameter in function of the reference trajectory. The method proposed has been validated on an experimental setup whose time calculation has been optimized to reach a control period of 1 ms. Future works will be done on the study of smaller components e.g. nanowires, in order to provide high speed and reliable assembly methods for nanosystems.