Multi-cell formation following in a concurrent control framework

Existing methods on automated multiple cells manipulation are limited to manipulation of cells within the Field of View (FoV). However, in many clinical studies of biological processes it is required to manipulate a group of cells in which the area of interest is larger than the FoV. In this paper, a concurrent control framework is proposed to control the multiple optical traps and motorized stage simultaneously. The proposed method allows us to bring the individual cells into a desired formation using optical traps and also to manipulate the whole group of cells collectively using the motorized stage. In fact, this work opens up challenges in introducing dual controllers to achieve concurrent trap-stage manipulation. Moreover, a distance based allocation algorithm is designed to assign laser beams to the cells. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed methodology.