3D Manipulation and Assembly of Microstructures Using Robotic Acoustic Streaming Tweezers

Abstract

Assembling micro-scale building blocks into customized functional architectures shows great potential in different biomedical applications. In this work, a Robotic Acoustic Streaming Tweezers (RAST) system for manipulating microstructures is reported. Acoustic streaming excited by the gigahertz bulk acoustic waves resonator imposes drag force on the microstructures, enabling multidimensional manipulation. By combining acoustic streaming micro-vortices with three dimensional platforms, multi-dimensional translation, rotation and orientation of individual microstructures with different shapes can be achieved based on the micro-manipulation system. These results indicated that the RAST system is beneficial and versatile for engineering complex architectures for various biomedical applications.