Robot-aided biological cell transport and obstacle removal for multiple operation steps

Abstract

Most of the existing automated cell transport approaches are oriented as single tasks, which cannot meet the increasing demand for complex cell operations that usually require a series of manipulation tasks. In this paper, an automated cell transportation approach toward multistep cell operation processes is reported. A novel control system is developed based on a manipulation platform for robot-aided optical tweezers, which can sequentially and continuously move a group of target cells to different task regions without interruption and remove suspended obstacles in the field of view. Potential field-based feedback controllers are developed to drive cells to move into different task regions and synchronously remove obstacles by utilizing the concepts of tweezers-cell coalition, contractive coalition. Experiments have been performed on the transfer of a group of cells to different task regions to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.