Apply RRT-based path planning to robotic manipulation of biological cells with optical tweezer

Cell transportation represents one of essential operations in many cellular engineering applications such as cell sorting and cell fusion, and has great potential in biomedical engineering and drug industry. This paper presents a path planning approach to cell transportation, where the cell is trapped by optical tweezer and controlled robotically to move towards the target position. To determine the collision-free path for the cell transportation, we develop a fast path planner based on RRT algorithm (Rapidly-exploring random trees). Simulation and experiment that are performed in transporting yeast cells demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.