Dielectrophoretic actuation strategy for micromanipulation along complex trajectories

The paper presents application of dielectrophoresis for manipulation of a microparticle in a liquid medium above a planar surface. The force on the microparticle is exerted by a non-uniform AC electric field. The field is generated by a set of micro-electrodes patterned on the planar surface and connected to a multi-channel voltage waveform generator. An novel yet simple control approach based on changing the phase delays among voltages on the electrodes is introduced together with a description of an efficient hardware implementation. Laboratory experiments with a 250-micron polystyrene bead are documented. This work was partly motivated by the series of international competitions called Mobile Microrobotics Challenge and organized by NIST and taken over by IEEE RAS recently.