MEMS-based Electronic Textiles Fabricated with Multi-robot Collaboration

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a methodology to fabricate wafer-scale electronic textiles that is a combination of MEMS-based microclamps and fabric textiles. We describe the capability of deterministic aligning and fastening textile layers with MEMS clamps to create electronic textiles using multi-robot collaboration in the NeXus, a custom additive manufacturing robotic system. To fabricate MEMS clamps, photolithography masks were designed based on the specific locations of intersections in the fabric textiles. The intersection identification was realized via a high-resolution image from the microscope based on a custom image processing algorithm in MATLAB®. To complete the deterministic alignment process of the fabric and clamps, two industrial robotic arms and one custom positioner were employed within our NeXus custom manufacturing system. Also, different robotic process tools were used during the aligning and fastening process of these substrates. Overall, a semi-automated interface was programmed and integrated with the robotic tool change process, visual servoing, target detection, and UV curable adhesive printing functions within the NeXus. The yield of alignment results of the MEMS clamps was assessed, and the completed corresponding fabric intersections were more than 95%.