Coalition transportation of cells with optical tweezers

In optical cells manipulation tasks, optical manipulation works only when the cell is located within the optical trap. Currently, due to the lack of control techniques that automatically control cell transfer while locating the cell within optical trap consistently, cells must be manipulated carefully to avoid escape from optical trap, which significantly decreases the efficiency of manipulation task. As a result, the development of a control method for rapid and accurate positioning of cells is becoming a very challenging issue. In this paper, we addressed this challenging problem by developing a unique vision feedback control method that controls both cell positioning and cell trapping simultaneously. We first establish a new geometric model to confine the cell within a local region specified near the optical trap and form a Cell-Tweezers Coalition (C-T Coalition) during manipulation. Then, a potential field function based controller is proposed to drive C-T Coalition to the desired position. Experiments of yeast cell manipulation are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2013 IEEE.