Automatic flocking manipulation of micro particles with robot-tweezers technologies

Flocking of micro-scaled particles, attracts increasing attention especially in cell engineering and drug industry, due to its potential application for particle manipulation with high throughput and productivity. This paper presents an efficient approach to flocking micro particles with robotics and optical tweezers technologies. All particles trapped by optical tweezers can be gradually moved towards a pre-defined region. The main contribution of this paper lies in a solution to achieve the flocking manipulation of particles in micro environments. A local potential function is proposed to avoid collision amongst particles and obstacles. Based on the relationship amongst laser power, particle movement velocity, and trapping force, saturation of velocities is employed to bound particle velocities. In this way, the flocking manipulation can be operated with efficiency and safety. Experiments on yeast cells with a robot-tweezers system are finally performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.