nanoWalker

This is my 1st realisation in the domain of precise motion control. Of course, when people hear "ROBOT"

they ussually think of some huge machinery with

2 legs, 2 feet one head.. and so one ;). (I guess its the result of to many "Terminators" or "I bots" ☻).

During the years the term of "robot/bot" has changed a lot (at the end of this page i'll give some liks for the interessed ones).

nano+Walker: nano is the billion part of a meter (for those who don't know if you cut one of your cell into about 10000 pieces, then you reached 1 nanometer - still didn't see any to try this thing :). Walker.. means that this small robot (see fig. 1) is able to walk with the precision in the range mentioned above. the interesting part is that it is able to place the blue spot on the upper sphere with precision arround 10-15nanometers in 5DoF (Degree of Freedom). The idea is to use such kind of small components to place/peak/assemble small objects (can be used in many many application - tipically in biology/medicine - check the link list at the end).

fig. 1 - The nanowalker and a set of spheres that are used to fix the tools.

Piezo disks are used for actuation. Amplitude and on/off time of the controling pulses are chosed depending on the accuracy/speed desired. Toactuate this robot i used the LPT or SOUND card WaveOut/AEX libraries to generate speciffic impulses (details about the software part can be found in section Softare development). Afterwards in order to obtain huge voltage peaks i used amplifiers supplied by 40-100Volts PSU (Power Supply Unit). You can see the robot doing a complexe movement in fig. 2 .

fig. 2 - Clip: complex motion of the robot.

fig. 3 - Clip: here You can see the robot moving a beamlignt from a laser on the screen.

This is it for the moment. (To be continued :)!