Pairing and moving swarm of micro particles into array with a robot-tweezer manipulation system

Batch manipulation of micro particles attracts increasing attention among researchers in bio-medical fields such as cellular engineering and drug discovery. Significant demand for both accuracy and productivity highlights the need of developing an automatic arraying approach to moving and pairing a swarm of particles to a pre-defined array. This paper presents our latest effort to achieve this objective by using integrated robotics and holographic optical tweezers technologies, where holographic optical tweezers function as special robot end-effectors. A controller is proposed to drive pairs of particles to the assigned regions which are centered at array points. The potential field method is utilized to avoid collisions between particles. Experiments on colloidal particles are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2011 IEEE.