TechTalks from event: Technical session talks from ICRA 2012

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Micro/Nanoscale Automation II

  • Gripper Synthesis for Indirect Manipulation of Cells Using Holographic Optical Tweezers Authors: Chowdhury, Sagar; Svec, Petr; Wang, Chenlu; Losert, Wolfgang; Gupta, Satyandra K.
    Optical Tweezers (OT) are used for highly accurate manipulations of biological cells. However, the direct exposure of cells to focused laser beam may negatively influence their biological functions. In order to overcome this problem, we generate multiple optical traps to grab and move a 3D ensemble of inert particles such as silica microspheres to act as a reconfigurable gripper for a manipulated cell. The relative positions of the microspheres are important in order for the gripper to be robust against external environmental forces and the exposure of high intensity laser on the cell to be minimized. In this paper, we present results of different gripper configurations, experimentally tested using our OT setup, that provide robust gripping as well as minimize laser intensity experienced by the cell. We developed a computational approach that allowed us to perform preliminary modeling and synthesis of the gripper configurations. The gripper synthesis is cast as a multi-objective optimization problem.
  • Robotic Pick-Place of Nanowires for Electromechanical Characterization Authors: Ye, Xutao; Zhang, Yong; Sun, Yu
    Pick-place of single nanowires inside scanning electron microscopes (SEM) is useful for prototyping functional devices and characterizing nanowires' properties. Nanowire pick-place has been typically performed via teleoperation, which is time-consuming and highly skill-dependent. This paper presents a robotic system capable of automated pick-place of single nanowires. Through SEM visual detection and vision-based motion control, the system transferred individual silicon nanowires from their growth substrate to a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) device that characterized the nanowires' electromechanical properties. The performance of the nanorobotic pick-up and placement procedures was quantified by experiments. The system demonstrated automated nanowire pick-up and placement with a high reliability.
  • Automated High Throughput Scalable Green Nanomanufacturing for Naturally Occurring Nanoparticles Using English Ivy Authors: Xu, Zhonghua; Lenaghan, Scott; Gilmore, David; Xia, Lijin; Zhang, Mingjun
    The discovery of novel nanomaterials, such as nanoparticles and nanofibers, is crucial to the expansion of the nanotechnology field. Of even greater importance, is the identification of nanomaterials that exist in nature and have low environmental toxicity when compared to man-made nanomaterials. In 2008, our group first discovered that ivy secretes nanoparticles for surface affixing. It was further demonstrated that these nanoparticles could be used for biomedical applications. This paper proposes an automated framework for high throughput scalable green nanomanufacturing of these naturally occurring nanoparticles. Several parameters necessary to optimize the growth of the ivy, including temperature, humidity, and light level, were regulated using feedback controls. Since the contact of ivy rootlets with a substrate is necessary to initiate the secretion of ivy adhesive, an electromechanical system was designed to automatically stimulate the rootlets to start the nanoparticle secretion process. The contact of ivy rootlets with a surface was formulated as a linear viscoelastic model and a speed control law was proposed for the actuator of the automated system. The proposed framework was verified through prototype experiments, and demonstrated promise for high throughput production of ivy nanoparticles.
  • Non-Vector Space Control for Nanomanipulations Based on Compressive Feedbacks Authors: Song, Bo; Zhao, Jianguo; Xi, Ning; Lai, King Wai Chiu; Yang, Ruiguo; Qu, Chengeng
    AFM based nanomanipulations have been successfully applied in various areas such as physics, biology and so forth in nano scale. Traditional nanomanipulations always have to approach the problems such as hysteresis, nonlinearity and thermal drift of the scanner, and the noise brought by the position sensor. In this research, a compressive feedbacks based non-vector space control approach is proposed for improving the accuracy of AFM based nanomanipulations. Instead of sensors, the local image was used as the feedback to a non-vector space controller to generate a closed-loop control for manipulation. In this paper, there are four research topics: First, local scan strategy was used to get a local image. Second, since the feedback is an image, a non-vector space controller was designed to deal with the difficulty in vector space such as calibration and coordinate transformation. Third, in order to further decrease the time spent on local scan, compressive sensing was introduced to this system. Finally, to overcome the disadvantage that compressive sensing costs time on reconstructing the original signal, we directly use the compressive data as the feedback. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results have shown that the system has a good performance on AFM tip motion control. Therefore, the non-vector space control method can make visual servoing easier, and the compressive feedback could make a high speed real-time control of nanomanipulation possible. In addition, thi
  • Nanotool Exchanger System Based on E-SEM Nanorobotic Manipulation System Authors: Nakajima, Masahiro; Kawamoto, Takuya; Kojima, Masaru; Fukuda, Toshio
    A novel nanotool exchanger system is proposed based on Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (E-SEM) nanorobotic manipulation system. We proposed to use the E-SEM nanomanipulation system for the analysis of biological specimen using various “nanotools” to realize flexible and complex nano-scale stiffness measurement, adhesion force measurement, cutting, and injection. The E-SEM can use to observe the biological samples in nano-scale and real-time without any drying or dyeing processes. As previous works, we applied the system to manipulate biological specimens, such as Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) and yeast cells. To maintain the livable condition of biological cells, it is important to reduce the exchange time of the nanotools. This is also important to improve the efficiency of biological specimen analysis using various nanotools without break the chamber pressure. This paper presents a novel nanotool exchanger system for exchanging different nanotools within the ESEM chamber. Through the nanotool exchanger system, the following advantages are mainly obtained, 1) it is not needed to open the sample chamber to exchange the nanotools and to evacuate the sample chamber pressure again, 2) it is not needed to operate manually to exchange nanotools, 3) it is possible to recover the nanotools by exchanging new one, 4) it is possible to use different tools continuously. Firstly, the design and fabrication are presented for the proposed nanotool adaptor, nanotool attachm
  • Controlled Positioning of Biological Cells Inside a Micropipette Authors: Zhang, Xuping; Leung, Clement; Lu, Zhe; Esfandiari, Navid; Casper, Robert; Sun, Yu
    Manipulating single cells with a micropipette is the oldest, yet still a widely used technique. This paper discusses the positioning of a single cell to a target position inside the micropipette after the cell is aspirated into the micropipette. Due to the small volume of a single cell (pico-liter) and nonlinear dynamics involved, this task has high skill requirements and is labor intensive in manual operation that is solely based on trial and error and has high failure rates. We present automated techniques in this paper for achieving this task. Computer vision algorithm was developed to track a single cell inside a micropipette for automated single-cell positioning. A closed-loop robust controller integrating the dynamics of cell motion was designed to accurately and efficiently position the cell to a target position inside the micropipette. The system achieved high success rates of 97% for cell tracking (n=100) and demonstrated its capability of accurately positioning a cell inside the micropipette within 8 seconds (vs. 25 seconds by highly skilled operators).