Industial and medical applications require both vision and manipulation systems to tackle the limitations of human vision and motion in inspection processes and microsurgical tasks.  This has driven the efforts to increase the precision of robot-guided manipulators and machine vision systems beyond sub-millimetre accuracies. Commercially available robotic systems can achieve millimetre accuracies with very few examples achieving accuracies slightly below such scale.

In this presentation, the modelling, design, and construction of innovative robotic systems and microscopy-based machine vision systems delivering micron motion and vision accuracies will be discussed along with proof-of-concept experimental tests demonstrating the potential of such technology for both industrial and microsurgical tasks. Furthermore, the design and implementation of laser-based sensing and surgical tools will be discussed outlining application-specific requirements as well as target biomedical applications.