Flexible 3-D Helix Fabrication by In-Situ SEM Micromanipulation System

The helical microstructure has been widely applied to various industries, including the mechanical manufacture, electronics, and biomedical engineering. Due to the miniature size of the helical microstructure, the low manufacture precision will highly degrade its working performance. Although current manufacture methods can realize its fabrication with relatively high accuracy, the used material is constrained to several specific conditions. To address the above problems, this article proposes a laconic and high-precision three-dimensional (3-D) manufacture method for the helical microstructure based on the microrobotic system without the limitation of materials. In this article, the microrobotic system with six degrees-of-freedom is developed for manufacture. Then, the image processing operation for providing feedback information is introduced. Third, the trajectory of each individual robotic module is designed according to the structure's certain size. After that, the control system with feedforward and double feedback is reported to realize the accurate manufacture. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate that the manufacture precision can reach up to 2 μm with the standard deviation (STD) of 1.06. This research will pave a new path for the high-precision 3-D manufacturing at small scale, and have long-term impacts on robot-aided manufacturing system with high potential for commercialization in the future.