Transporting cells with mobile microrobots.

Current research activities on the development of a system for transport and manipulation of biological cells with microrobots are described. If single cells in liquid are to be placed on a grid or sorted by cell type, having a system that can automatically lift, transport and release cells can significantly speed up such a tedious task. Therefore, a system is being developed that can automatically sort different cells by transporting them to different repositories. A method to recognise different types of cells is also being developed. The system consists of several components; a motorised inverted microscope, several different microrobots and a software architecture to control the whole cell manipulation workstation and to provide a user interface.

[1]  Reymond Clavel,et al.  Stick and slip actuators and parallel architectures dedicated to microrobotics , 1996, Other Conferences.

[2]  Sergej Fatikow,et al.  Development of mobile versatile nanohandling microrobots: design, driving principles, haptic control , 2005, Robotica.

[3]  Urban Simu,et al.  Fabrication of monolithic piezoelectric drive units for a miniature robot , 2002 .

[4]  J Conia,et al.  The micro‐robotic laboratory: Optical trapping and scissing for the biologist , 1997, Journal of clinical laboratory analysis.

[5]  Sergej Fatikow,et al.  Control system for motion control of a piezoelectric micromanipulation robot , 1998, Adv. Robotics.

[6]  Shusheng Bi,et al.  Automatic micromanipulating system for biological applications with visual servo control , 2001 .

[7]  Jörg Seyfried,et al.  Flexible microrobots for micro assembly tasks , 2000, MHS2000. Proceedings of 2000 International Symposium on Micromechatronics and Human Science (Cat. No.00TH8530).

[8]  A. Ashkin.  Acceleration and trapping of particles by radiation pressure , 1970 .

[9]  Wolfgang Zesch,et al.  Inertial drives for micro- and nanorobots: two novel mechanisms , 1995, Other Conferences.

[10]  Fabio Caparrelli,et al.  Vision-based closed-loop control of mobile microrobots for microhandling tasks , 2001, Optics East.

[11]  Quan Zhou,et al.  Three-dimensional position control of a parallel micromanipulator using visual servoing , 2000, SPIE Optics East.

[12]  Ronald S. Fearing,et al.  Automating microassembly with ortho-tweezers and force sensing , 2001, Proceedings 2001 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Expanding the Societal Role of Robotics in the the Next Millennium (Cat. No.01CH37180).

[13]  M. Ozkan,et al.  Electro-optical platform for the manipulation of live cells , 2003 .