Post date: May 18, 2011 2:21:55 PM
The Mobile Microrobotics team of the MSRAL competed in the final round of the NIST Mobile Microrobotics Challenge held at IEEE ICRA 2011 in Shanghai, China from May 9 - 13. The team was one of only seven international teams to qualify for the competition. The team successfully completed both of the challenge events: 1. Mobility Challenge and 2. Microassembly Event.
In the Mobility Challenge, a microrobot must navigate a prescribed course through a planar track in the fastest possible time. The Microassembly event requires a microrobot to assemble multiple micro-scale components in a narrow channel. This event will simulate manipulation challenges found in in vivo medical applications, such as operation inside a human blood vessel, and assembly-based nanomanufacturing. Each competing team must furnish its own microrobots, which must operate wirelessly and fit within a 600-μm-diameter sphere.
The MSRAL team was able to navigate the course in Mobility challenge with the fourth best average time while it finished just one micro-scale assembled component short of first place in the Microassembly event. For more information on the competition please visit the competition website here:
http://www.nist.gov/pml/semiconductor/mmc/
The Mobile Microrobot team consists of students: Sean Lyttle, Wuming Jing, Shi Bai, Zhenbo Fu, Xi Chen, Guitao Zhang, Jennifer Field and advisors: Prof. Yong Shi and Prof. Dave Cappelleri