Distributed Force Control for Microrobot Manipulation via Planar Multi‐Spot Optical Tweezer

Abstract Optical tweezers (OT) represent a versatile tool for micro‐manipulation. To avoid damages to living cells caused by illuminating laser directly on them, microrobots controlled by OT can be used for manipulation of cells or living organisms in microscopic scale. Translation and planar rotation motion of microrobots can be realized by using a multi‐spot planar OT. However, out‐of‐plane manipulation of microrobots is difficult to achieve with a planar OT. This paper presents a distributed manipulation scheme based on multiple laser spots, which can control the out‐of‐plane pose of a microrobot along multiple axes. Different microrobot designs have been investigated and fabricated for experimental validation. The main contributions of this paper include: i) development of a generic model for the structure design of microrobots which enables multi‐dimensional (6D) control via conventional multi‐spot OT; ii) introduction of the distributed force control for microrobot manipulation based on characteristic distance and power intensity distribution. Experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its potential applications, which include indirect manipulation of micro‐objects.