Finite-Time Control for Biological Cells Manipulation with Robot-Tweezers System: Theory and Experiments

Biological cells positioning and reorientation are the two common manipulation techniques involved in many cell-based biomedical applications. All the reported autonomous frameworks that achieve cell position and orientation regulation are in the sense of Lyapunov asymptotic stability within infinite time. This paper introduces a finite-time (FT) control strategy to achieve automated cell position regulation utilizing robot-aided optical tweezers system. Utilizing the dynamic equation of the optically trapped cells, state feedback together with output feedback FT controller is developed. The performance of the developed approach is demonstrated experimentally with both automation of cell transportation and rotational control on human fibroblast cells. The experimental results indicated that the proposed FT control method for the achievement of cell position and orientation regulation is feasible and exhibits faster convergence rate than conventional controllers with similar structures. This work is the first time to apply FT control to achieve cell position regulation using robot-aided optical tweezers.