Work Pattern Formation Technology for Multi-micromachines

One of the problems to realize safe and reliable social system is to reduce the cost and time for maintenance works. In the presently available maintenance style of large-scale facilities with big and complex structure like power plant, suspension of operation and concomitant jobs like disassembly and reassembly of the object facilities are necessary. Especially in maintenance requiring access to parts assembled in narrow places like pipes inside the facility, these jobs are unavoidable. But from the viewpoint of operating efficiency, the style of maintenance and inspection without need of such disassembly and reassembly jobs is much desired. In this sense, the micromachine which can easily go into the narrow places, is expected as one of the new methods to realize unmanned maintenance. To use micromachines as intelligent actuators for operations in narrow places, it is desirable to endow micromachines with functions to move individually and to work cooperatively in a group, because the micromachine miniaturized enough to go into the narrow place is restricted in its functions, and it is difficult to realize high speed and high output jobs by a single unit. The objective of our research is to develop a control system for multi-micromachines to construct desired work patterns. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to generate desired patterns and show some experimental results.