Micro-assembly

The trend toward miniaturisation of the last decade has caused a real revolution in the manufacturing of many products and systems in several fields, trying to reduce volume and weight, and integrate more functions in a smaller space. Besides the various manufacturing techniques presented in the previous chapters of the book, growing interest has been gained by the manipulation and the assembly of different micro-components for the production of such complex systems, specifically of hybrid micro-products. In this context, this chapter aims to get an overview on different micro-assembly aspects, including: methods, robots for micro-assembly with related examples, micro-manipulation strategies and tools, vision and force sensing for micro-assembly, consideration of environmental conditioning, and an example of a robotized micro-assembly work-cell developed at the authors' laboratory.