3D assembly of cellular structures with coordinated manipulation by rail-guided multi-microrobotic system

3D assembly of cellular structures is important for the fabrication of biological substitute in tissue engineering. In this paper, a novel rail-guided multi-microrobotic system was proposed for the assembly of cellular structure. The cellular 2-dimensional (2D) module was fabricated by UV illumination of the crosslinkable hydrogel. The coordinated manipulation among the micromanipulators was performed with newly designed concentric movement along the rail, which realized the arbitrary change of micromanipulator posture. Through the rotation of the end-effectors around the specimen without swapping out the visual field, the manipulation flexibility was improved. The distance information between the micromanipulator and the module was acquired from vision feedback system and utilized for the automatic pick-up of the microstructure. Through the cooperation among multi-manipulators with hybrid motors, the micromanipulation to assemble the 3D structure with 30 nm operation resolution was achieved. Finally, the rail-guided DeSCom system realized the bottom-up fabrication of cellular vascular-like microtube with vision feedback.