Predictive control of a micro bead´s trajectory in a dielectrophoresis-based device

Micro and nano-particles can be trapped by a non uniform electric field through the effect of the dielectrophoretic force. Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is used to separate, manipulate and sense micro particles in several domains, such as in biological or Carbon Nano-Tubes (CNTs) manipulations. This paper tackles the creation of a closed loop strategy in order to control, using DEP, the trajectory of micro objects using vision feedback. A modeling of the dielectrophoresis force is presented to illustrate the non linearity of the system and the high dynamics of the object under dielectrophoresis. A control strategy based on the generalized predictive control method is proposed with the aim of controlling the trajectory, taking advantage of the high dynamics despite the non linearity. Simulated results are shown to evaluate our control strategy.