Feeding function is a major problem in the design of the production systems. A feeder has to guarantee the position and the orientation of the components it supplies to the assembly system. However, the more the objects are small the more the required precision is high. The presented works have been realised for the feeding of components of which range of size is from some millimetres to hundred of microns. Moreover, the design of the feeding systems has been thought in order to be used with a large range of size of components. The first contribution of the thesis consisted in elaborating a feeding strategy associating high accuracy and flexibility for millimetre-length components. This work has been done as a contribution for an European project of the 6th PCRD, the IP EUPASS (Evolvable Ultra Precision Assembly SystemS). To meet the standard of EUPASS, the proposed feeding system is flexible (it can transport all the test-bed components), modular (it is ?plug and produce?), highly accurate (micrometer range) and based on an opened control architecture. The second part of the work is dedicated to hundred micrometer size components. The objective was to move several kind of micro-objects on a surface until a given position. We have used controlled mechanical vibrations to move micro-objects by inertia. Because the friction force is not well characterized at the micrometer level, we have firstly proposed a method to calculate it in the case of a planar contact between the component and the surface of the feeder. Knowing this force, we where able to control precisely the vibrations of the feeding system in order to move the component. Using this method, a step by step displacement is obtained. The steps can be controlled to give the resolution of the system. Finally, a visual servoing allows controlling the movement of micro-objects until their final position.
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