A force control based cell injection approach in a bio-robotics system

Abstract

Robotic cell injection is a technique that employs automated device to insert substances into a single living cell with a fine needle. Most existing microinjection methods are based on position control without explicit regulation of the injection force. The injection force, if not controlled properly, may destroy the cell and lead to death of the cells. In this paper, we propose a force control based cell injection technology to explicitly regulate the injection force to follow the desired force trajectory during the injection. Any desired force trajectory that is twice continuously differentiable can be realized by the proposed approach. The convergence of the force tracking algorithm is provably guaranteed. Experiments performed on a laboratorial robotic cell injection system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.