Novel Strategy for High Precision Automated Robotic Positioning based on Fabry-Perot Interferometry Principle

On account of the micro-scale building components manipulation and high precision demands, the interest is oriented toward automated robotic micro-manipulation and micro-assembly to provide low-cost, high performances, notably for integrated optical devices. The paper proposes a novel strategy for high precision fully automated robotic alignment. This strategy permits high accurate and fast automated alignment of two optical building structures (optical fiber, optical component) with optimal optical function in a known referencing between the robotic manipulator and the optical axis. The strategy allows to identify and to compensate the optical component misalignment angles and the robot translation error angles yielded from the robotic manipulator. The approach relies on robotic positioning combined with the use of Fabry-Perot interferometry of the reflected light irradiance for closed loop control. Fabry-Perot interference principle is especially used to give a rapid and high precision measurement. A photo-robotic positioning model is proposed that relates the optical component misalignment angles and robot translation error angles with the Fabry-Perot measurements. A 6 Degree-Of- Freedom (DOF) robotic platform is used to relatively align an optical component to an optical fiber for experimental validation. The obtained results leads to robotic positioning uncertainty of about 0.0021° and alignment time of less than 12 s.