Flocking of micro-scale particles with robotics and optical tweezers technologies

This paper presents a novel flocking framework for the manipulation of micro-scale particles with robotics and optical tweezers technologies. A region-based flocking algorithm is used to calculate the particles´ trajectories. The optical tweezers are used to trap and move the particles along generated trajectories. All particles can be gradually moved into a pre-defined region. The main contribution of this paper lies in the proposal of using multi-agent solution to address the flocking problem of particles in micro environment. The proposed framework can be applied to many bio-applications such as cell sorting, cell property characterization, and so on, with high throughput and precision. Experiments on micro-scale particles with a robot-tweezers system are finally performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.