Automated biomanipulation to assemble cellular microstructure with railed multi-microrobotic system

The fabrication of vessel-mimetic microchannel provides critical access to enable sufficient nutrient delivery for engineered composite tissues. This paper presents a novel method to engineer vascular-like microchannel by automated assembly of donut-shaped micromodules embedding fibroblast cells. A railed microrobotic system is set up with multi manipulators of 30 nm positioning resolution under an optical microscope. The coordinated manipulation among the micromanipulators is performed with newly designed concentric movement along the rail, which realized the arbitrary change of micromanipulator posture. With the novel developed image processing algorithm for the tracking of micromanipulator and micromodules, the automated bio-assembly of vascular-like microchannel is achieved which is free from the influence of the occlusion during contact manipulation. Experimental results showed that the pick-up success rate is around 98% and tracking algorithm is robust. Finally, we achieved automated assembly of microchannel at a speed of 6 micromodules/min, which is efficient enough to fabricate vessel-mimetic substitute with macro-significance dimension for biological application.