Assembly of Planar Structures by Parallel Actuation of MEMS Microrobots
(Supporting Material and PDF of Paper)


The Hilton Head Workshop 2008: A Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems Workshop, pp. 202-207.
Bruce R. Donald^a,b,*, Christopher Levey^c, and Igor Paprotny^d,a
aDepartment of Computer Science, Duke University, Durham NC 27708
^bDepartment of Biochemistry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham NC 27708
^cThayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH 03755
^dDepartment of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH 03755
*Corresponding Author:
Bruce R. Donald
Department of Computer Science
Duke University
Department of Biochemistry
Duke University Medical Center


The video below is supplementary material for the following paper:

B. R. Donald, C. Levey, and I. Paprotny.
"Assembly of Planar Structures by Parallel Actuation of MEMS Microrobots."
The Technical Digest of the 2008 Hilton Head Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems Workshop, pp. 202-207.
June 1-5, 2008. [PDF]

Movie of a Planar Microassembly Experiment

Movie of a representative assembly experiment using devices from species 1,3,4 and 5, recorded through an optical microscope. The robots are initially arranged along the corners of a rectangle with sides 1 by 0.9 mm. The assembly experiment is divided into three stages. During stage 1, devices 4 and 5 dock together to form the initial stable shape. In stage 2, device 3 docks with the initial stable shape, while during stage 3, device 1 docks with the stable shape, forming the final assembly.

AVI with DivX 21 MB
AVI with Cinepac Radius 360 MB
AVI with Cinepac Radius - zipped 295 MB
AVI with Indeon 132 MB
AVI with Indeon - zipped 113 MB


A second video, Pas de Deux avec les Microrobots is available here.
It shows simultaneous control and operation of two of our stress-engineered microrobots



These videos may not be used for commercial or for-profit purposes.
They are copyrighted by the authors.