Open loop control of dielectrophoresis non contact manipulation

The framework of this paper is the study of “No Weight Robots-NWR” that use non-contact transmission of movement (e.g. dielectrophoresis) to manipulate micro-objects enabling significant throughput (1Hz). Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is currently used to separate, manipulate and detect micro particles in several domains with high speed and precision, such as in biological cell or Carbon Nano-Tubes (CNTs) manipulations. A dielectrophoresis system can also be considered as a robotic system whose inputs are the voltages of the electrodes and output is the object trajectory. This “No Weight Robots” enables the positionning of the manipulted object in a 3D space. This paper is summarized the modeling principle of this new type of robots and some first results on trajectory control in 2D space.