There we were saying that one didn’t hear too much from IBM Corp about IBM robots these days (CI No 1,920) when in comes a missive about how IBM research engineers claim to have solved one of the most difficult problems in robotics how to enable a robot to make with great precision the exceedingly fine alignments that are necessary for assembling parts of such high-technology products as computer packages, electronic circuit boards and disk drives: the solution involves the ingenious coupling of air and electromagnetism and the result is an exquisitely simple robotic device that has but one moving part and operates both frictionlessly and faultlessly one has been operating that way continuously at IBM’s Thomas J Watson Re-search Center in Yorktown Heights, New York for more than a year, the company says, adding that it is compact, easy to assemble, taking about a half-hour to put together; the new micro-robot can work down to 0.2 micron, more than 100 times the precision of current robots; the objective was to find a way to avoid repeating in the micro-robot all the bad stuff in the macro-robot – gears, bearings and other things that limit its precision, and so it has just two working components, a stationary one, or stator, and a moving one, or armature, held together and driven by a variable electromagnetic field while being forced apart frictionlessly by a thin layer of compressed air.
