High Fidelity Force Feedback Facilitates Manual Injection in Biological Samples

Micro-teleoperated interaction with biological cells is of special interest. The low fidelity of previous systems aimed at such small scale tasks prompted the design of a novel manual bilateral cell injection system. This systems employed the coupling of a null-displacement active force sensor with a haptic device having negligible effective inertia. This combination yielded a bilateral interaction system that was unconditionally stable even when the scaling gains were high. To demonstrate the capability of this system, two experiments were performed. A hard trout egg was delicately punctured and a small dye amount was injected in an embryo within a zebra fish egg without causing other forms of damage. The results demonstrate that the system let an operator dextrously interact with reduced reliance on visual feedback.