Design a control system for micro-controller

This thesis report demonstrates a process of designing a control system for a low-cost micro-manipulator fabricated through 3D printing technique. A 3D printed micro-manipulator easily suffers from the problems of unexpected and non-uniform output motions, so a control system is designed to mitigate the external disturbance and improve the output precision of output motions, operation complexity, and motion capability. The overall design process consists of mechanical fabrication, control system design and experimental validations. From the results of validations tests, the 3D printed micro-manipulator is able to generate three dimensional(X, Y, and Z) motorized movements with the travel range at 38mm in each dimension. Also, it can provide an adjustable output resolution based on different parameter settings in the control system. The minimum step size can reach to 0.76 µm/step. The suggested step size is 2µm/step due to the limitation of perception resolution. The average output precision of the output motion is bounded within 5 µm in the validation tests. In order to improve the user experiences, the suitable operation speed for each dimension ranges from 25 to 50 µm/s. Users can easily control the 3D printed micro-manipulator to do some simple micro-manipulation tasks by manipulating micro-samples through teleoperated or semi-autonomous control provided in the control system. The parts used to build the micro-manipulator are common, off-the-shelf, or 3D printed, so users can easily do the maintenance or repairs on the 3D printed micro-manipulator.