Automated in-vivo transportation control of biological cells using robot-aided optical tweezers

In vivo manipulation of biological cells has attracted considerable attention in recent years. This process is particularly useful for precision medicine, such as cancer target therapy. Collision is a main cause of the failure of in-vivo particle transportation. Robotics technology is becoming necessary to stably and effectively manipulate and control single target cells in a complex in vivo environment. This chapter presents a robot-aided optical tweezers-based manipulation technology for transportation of single biological cells in vivo. In the proposed approach, a collision-avoidance vector method is utilized to avoid obstacles during the transportation of the target cell. With the proposed approach, different collision avoidance strategies are designed to suit for different transportation environments. Experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.