Automatic pickup and release of particle by depth estimation method with micromanipulators for particle sorting system

This paper proposes a novel method which is depth estimation by a microscope for automatic pickup and release of particles for sorting particles. In a case of manipulation of pollen for hybridization of plants, it is required to manipulate particles of living pollen which must not be given damage. In view of a microscope, focused area is very narrow, and edges of almost objects then have blurs of which its width depends on distance from the focal point. Namely, depth distance from focal point can be estimated based on the blur width. As the proposed depth estimation method, formulation and algorithm of the depth estimation are developed on a system consisting of an optical microscope and two micromanipulators. Moreover, pickup and release of a particle in automatically are achieved by using this method. In this paper, in order to confirm precision and effectiveness of the proposed method, the pickup and release of a particle of actual pollen are shown by the experiments.