Abstract
In order to investigate microscopic hardness and stiffness of a micropart in a special chamber, a micro surface measurement which relies on an instrumented indentation testing (IIT) micro-robot and a vision base navigation system is proposed. This micro surface measurement system is composed of the IIT micro-robot and its precise navigation system. The IIT robot incorporates with an electromagnetic driven micro-force generator, can be provided a precise controlled force up to 17 mN with 50 μN resolutions pass through the micro indenter. The displacement of the indenter head can be also measured by the linear valuable differential transformer (LVDT) on machine. Thus, this machine can generate and monitor the testing force and depth behavior of the indenter during whole dwell time. Since the overall size is small enough to implement on the piezo-driven micro robot. The robot with a micro indenter is capable to move precisely step by step with 1 μm per step on a metal plate. With the help of an image processing technique, the vision combination system with the local close up view and the overall global view can be identified the coordinate of small robot precisely over the working range In the experimental, the results have shown that the IIT robot can be given an indentation load-depth characteristic of an unhealthy human tooth at the specified point automatically.
