Development of a Micromanipulator Robot for Cell Injection with Sub-picoliter Scale

This paper presents a micromanipulator robot system for cell injection with sub-picoliter scale, which is mainly composed of visual module, precision positioning module, cell holding module, cell injection module and control module. In this system, the cell manipulation is guided via visual feedback algorithm, which makes the cell injection automatically. Cell holding module and cell injection module are used to hold and inject cells, both of which are realized by a pneumatic syringebased pump, respectively. A dual-loop controller based on PID and integrated sliding-mode algorithm is used in the pump to regulate the liquid injected into the cell. As for the cell holding module, a switch control method is utilized to adjust the module keeping holding/releasing state. The precision positioning module produces high precision displacement via the step motor and lead screw nut, which is able to realize a resolution of sub-micrometer. Finally, the prototype of the proposed robot system is fabricated. The experimental studies validate that the robot system is feasible and high performance.