A switching controller for high speed cell transfer with a robot-aided optical tweezers manipulation system

Rapid separation and transfer of target cells from heterogeneous mixture to desired region have become a key issue in many biomedical applications. In this paper, we propose an approach to high speed cell transfer for sorting rare cells from a small population of samples accurately using a robotic manipulation system equipped with optical tweezers. A novel switching geometrical model is established first for modeling high speed cell transfer, optical laser trapping, and obstacle avoidance based on the dynamics analysis. A normalized constraint function is designed to formulate how the trapped cell is maintained within the optical trap while avoiding obstacles. Then, a potential field based switching controller is developed, which can achieve automated cell trapping, high speed cell transfer, optical trap maintenance, and obstacle avoidance simultaneously. Finally, experiments of transferring cancer cells are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.