Development and implementation of a biomanipulation system with magnetic-driven microrobots

Recently, biomanipulation microrobots have attracted much attention in both academia and industry since they have become a promising tool to perform the practical biological micromanipulation tasks. In this field, biological micromanipulation on micro-fluidic chip emerge as a new focus since it can be used to improve the biomanipulation efficiency and stability. This study aims to develop a micromanipulation system with magnetic driven microrobots to implement the practical biomanipulations on a micro-fluidic chip. A novel flexure-based micromanipulator with large-workspace and micro/nano scale motion accuracy is proposed in this paper. After a series of mechanism optimal designs and analytic modeling, the positioning performance of the micromanipulators are evaluated by using the ANSYS Workbench Platform. After the mechanism fabrication, with the consideration of rate-dependent hysteresis effect inherent in piezoelectric ceramics (PZT) actuators, a novel hybrid visual servo control (HVSC) strategy combining with the Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) and the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is proposed. Afterwards, a series of practical biomanipulation experiments are successfully implemented by using the designed control strategy. Both theoretical analysis and visual tracking results uniformly demonstrate the satisfactory performance of the developed system.