Optical manipulation of pairing biological cells using an artificial potential field based controller

Many biomedical applications require locating and pairing of biological cells accurately from different groups. With an increased demand for both precise and high throughout in biomedical applications, a control framework that can enable automated cell pairing manipulation is highly demanded. This paper presents a novel approach to manipulating cell pairing operations using integrated robotics and optical tweezers technologies, where a robotically controlled optical tweezers functions as a special robot end-effector in cell manipulation. Based on the dynamic analysis of the trapped cell and the concept of concentric circle, a potential field based controller is developed to drive two groups of cells to form an inner and an outer circle, respectively. The proposed cell pairing approach has advantages that there is no need to pre-assign destinations to cells and there is no limit in scalability in pairing large groups of cells. Experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.