An Efficient Method for the Design and Fabrication of 2D Laminate Robotic Structures

Microrobots are constructed based on processes involving lamination of 2D materials and laser ablation. To satisfy the size constraint of the laser cutting field, different microrobotic components are tiled within a square template during the design process. Here we develop a number of automated 2D tiling algorithms that aim to improve microrobot fabrication efficiency. We quantify and compare the performance of a deterministic method, a method based on simulated annealing and expectation maximization, and a method based on potential functions and stochastic gradient descent. These methods automatically tile irregular 2D shapes within a template, and they can be applied to improve the fabrication efficiency of microrobotic components. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, we design and fabricate 102 different robot wings in the same setting, which represents over five times improvement compared to previous methods. Flapping experiments with these wings are further conducted to identify the corresponding operating conditions.