Electrophoresis-based motion planning and control of a nanowire in fluid suspension

Automated manipulation of nanowires or nanotubes would enable the scalable manufacturing of nanodevices for a variety of applications. This paper presents electrophoresis-based motion planning and control of a single nanowire in liquid suspension with a simple, generic set of electrodes. We first present a dynamic model of nanowires motion in dilute suspension with a set of N × N controllable electrodes. Since the motion planning of a nanowire from one position to the target location is NP-hard, we present two heuristic algorithms and then compare these algorithms with the rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) and A*-based approaches. The results show that the proposed algorithms obtain suboptimal minimum time trajectories. The experimental and numerical results confirm the analytical findings.