Design of Mieroassembly Through Process Modeling in Virtual Reality

In this paper we present a virtual reality simulator for the entire construction process of microsystems via microassembly. The simulator can check the feasibility and estimate the yield prior to actual execution. The simulator uses custom developed robotic algorithms to quantitatively identify and track uncertainty propagation in a microassembly process. Planning, control and event handling schemes such as calibration, visual servoing, fault detection etc. are implemented in a realistic manner and can be visualized in virtual 3D in real-time. Furthermore, the scaling effects in sub-millimeter scale that generally causes misalignments due to dominant surface forces are uniquely taken into account in the proposed simulator. The software application, entirely developed in-house, can expedite micromanufacturing by cutting down on the production cycle iterations while ensuring a lower capital investment and guaranteed high yield.