Automated Multi-Microbead Transportation and Placement Based on Visual Feedback

This paper presents a full automated microbead manipulation system for the microbead aspiration and placement. In the system, a glass capillary micropipette is used to aspirate target microbeads and dispense them to desired positions on the substrate of petri dish. The detection and tracking of the microbead and the micropipette tip, generated by image processing, is treated as state feedback in the closed loop system. During the transferring object, the system is able to aspirate whole microbead into micropipette stably based on proposed slide mode adaptive controller (SMAC), which is high speed, and highly precise. Compared with the other micromanipulation system, our system have good potential in biological applications, such as embryonic stem cells (ES), somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), or blastomere biopsies during pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which will reduce some of the damage on living cell and improve efficiency and accuracy of operation.