Automated Transportation of Multiple Cell Types Using a Robot-Aided Cell Manipulation System With Holographic Optical Tweezers

Abstract

Transferring multiple cell types with high precision and efficiency has become increasingly important for developing cell-based assays. In this study, an enabling technology is proposed for simultaneous automated transportation of multiple cell types utilizing a robot-aided cell manipulation system equipped with holographic optical tweezers. The dynamics of a trapped cell is initially analyzed. A control constraint is introduced to confine the offset of cells within the optical trap to prevent cells from escaping the trap during transportation. Unlike existing methods determining the critical offset through manual calibration for only a particular cell type, this proposed approach can automatically derive and apply the control constraint to multiple cell types with different radii. A controller is then developed for automated transportation of multiple cell types with different sizes in which exact values of model parameters, such as trapping stiffness and drag coefficient, are not required. Experiments are finally performed on the transportation of yeast cells and osteoblast-like MC3T3-E1 cells to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.