Besides assembling, processes like drilling, cutting, and pasting are required in various operations to human bodies or micro-machines. Force control is essential to those dexterous operations even in the micro world. For this purpose, a prototype micro operation hand with two fingers constrained to parallel motion linkages was developed. It uses magnetic suspension technology so that fine force control without force sensor is realized. The accuracy of positioning is a few m with a range of tens mm. The accuracy of force control is 30 mgf with a range of hundreds gf. The effectiveness of the proposed hand was verified by the application to various micro operations including mechanical processes.

Force control is required in dexterous micro operation of small mechanical parts and biological objects. Our research aims at the development of micro operation hands. For this purpose a finger subsystem with a lever mechanism and magnetic actuators were developed and applied to contact motion task. In this paper, characteristics of the mechanism and actuators are analyzed. A motion control system which compensates for disturbances is designed and applied to drawing tasks of micro figures.