Abstract
The need of fully automated microassembly systems place specific functional requirements on the design and fabrication of critical equipment elements such as grippers, sensors, manipulators and feeders. The paper provides an overview of current microfeeding technologies for microassembly operations and critically evaluates their applicability and limitations. A new microfeeder design is also proposed based on contactless pneumatic distributed manipulation. By cooperation of dynamically programmable microactuators, a number of feeding functions and even some elementary assembly operations can be achieved.
