Automated Pairing Manipulation of Biological Cells with a Robot-Tweezers Manipulation System

With an increased demand for various cell-based clinical applications and drug discovery, an enable technology that can automatically locate and pair biological cells from different groups, with high precision and throughput, is highly demanded. This paper presents a novel approach to achieving such cell manipulation using an automatically controlled holographic optical tweezers system, where a robotically controlled optical tweezers functions as a special manipulator to transfer cells automatically. The proposed cell pairing approach utilizes the concept of concentric circles for topology design and the artificial potential field functions for controller development. The significance of the proposed method lies in that the preassignment of cell destinations is not needed, the interdistance amongst the paired cells is controllable, and grouping scalability is not limited. Experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.