Within the last few years, microrobotics and microsystem technology (MST) have become a focus of interest to industry and evolved into an important field with great application potential. It plays a decisive role for industry to be competitive in many areas such as medicine, production engineering, biotechnology, environmental technology, automotive products, etc. Despite of the growing interest in this new technology, there is hardly any book or lecture course that treats microrobotics and MST in a coherent and comprehensive way. This course is an attempt of the Microrobotics and Control Engineering Division (AMiR) to give students a systematic introduction to microrobotics and MST. It discusses all important aspects of this rapidly expanding technology, its diversity of products and fields of application. The course contains an overview of numerous ideas of new devices and the problems of manufacturing them.

Professional competence:
The students:

• name the ideas, challenges and activities of microrobotics and microsystem technology
• describe the microrobotics and MST applications
• characterise MST methods
• name microsensor functionality
• characterise microsensor examples
• discuss MST terms of information technology
• classify microrobotics

Methodological competence
The students:

• discover interdisciplinary connections and links between scientific and technical fields of research and development
• learn technical abstraction of complex contexts

Social competence
The students:

• solving problems partially as group
• present their solutions and approaches to the group

Self-competence
The students:

• reflect their knowledge of technical computer science
• learn to expand on their professional competence independently

Ideas and problems of microrobotics and MST; applications; techniques of MST; silicon-based micromechanics; LIGA technology; microactuators: principles and examples (electrostatic, piezoelectric, magnetostrictive, electromagnetic, SMA-based, thermomechanical, electrorheological and other actuators); microsensors: principles and examples (force and pressure, position and speed, acceleration, biological and chemical, temperature and other sensors); MST and information processing; microsystem design and simulation; classification of microrobots; coarse positioning of a microrobot; fine positioning of a microrobot; handling of microparts: problems and solutions; micro grasp techniques; microassembly; process automation by microrobots; desktop robot cell in SEM

Associated with the modules:
Embedded Systems and Microrobotics

At the end of the semester

Oral exam in German