The industry has continuously downscaled integrated circuits onto a silicon base plate, now mass producing microchips at sub-millimetre scale. As adhesive forces grow at this scale, methods of non contact handling are becoming increasingly more interesting for transporting the chips. Currently, the most promising form of non-contact handling is acoustic levitation. In this approach, cuboid shapes can be manipulated in six degrees of freedom using multi-axis acoustic levitators. Levitated objects exhibit low stiffness and low damping, making the system vulnerable to disturbances. To enable precise positioning of a cuboid chip, feedback is required to counteract these disturbances. Feedback could potentially be implemented using a low-latency tracking algorithm.
This work focusses on implementing an event camera to track the position of an acoustically levitating cuboid within a multi-axis levitator. The Metavision 3D Detection and Tracking algorithm is used to perform the tracking. First, the illumination and surface properties of various concepts are investigated to generate events along the edges of the cuboid on the event plane, while minimizing events on the cuboid’s surface. These aspects have been identified as essential for the effectiveness of the algorithm. Second, the conditions under which the tracking algorithm can be applied are examined. These include both static and dynamic conditions, failure velocity, and influence of various parameters.
The findings from these investigations demonstrate that the Metavision tracking algorithm is capable of reliably tracking a levitating cuboid in stationary conditions with multiple high-intensity diffuse light sources using an event camera, ensuring that the tracking parameters are specified within certain bounds. However, when the cuboid is actively actuated, the algorithm becomes unreliable. Frequent tracking failures are observed under these dynamic conditions. These results contribute to the broader concept of implementing feedback for acoustically levitating cuboids in potential future applications.