Towards Dynamic Simulation Guided Optimal Design of Tumbling Microrobots
This work addresses the costly and time-consuming trial-and-error process in microrobot design for researchers and engineers in robotics and micro-engineering.
The paper tackles the problem of designing microrobots by addressing the lack of dynamic simulation tools that account for adhesion and friction at small scales, presenting a simulator for intermittent and non-point contact to study and select optimal shapes for specific tasks.
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are no good dynamic simulation tools to predict the motion or performance of a microrobot as it moves against a substrate. At smaller length scales, the influence of adhesion and friction, which scales with surface area, becomes more pronounced. Thus, rigid body dynamic simulators, which implicitly assume that contact between two bodies can be modeled as point contact are not suitable. In this paper, we present techniques for simulating the motion of microrobots where there can be intermittent and non-point contact between the robot and the substrate. We use this simulator to study the motion of microrobots of different shapes and select shapes that are most promising for performing a given task.