Design, Analysis, and Control of a Novel Safe Cell Micromanipulation System With IPMC Actuators

This paper presents the design, analysis, and control of a novel micromanipulation sys-tem to facilitate the safe handling/probing of biological cells. The robotic manipulatorhas a modular design, where each module provides two degrees-of-freedom (2DOF) andthe overall system can be made up of a number of modules depending on the desired levelof dexterity. The module design has been optimized in simulation using an integratedionic polymer-metal composite (IPMC) model and mechanical mechanism model toensure the best system performance from the available IPMC material. The optimal sys-tem consists of two modules with each DOF actuated by a 27.5 mm long by 10 mm wideactuator. A 1DOF control structure has been developed, which is adaptively tuned usinga model-free iterative feedback tuning (IFT) algorithm to adjust the controller parame-ters to optimize the system tracking performance. Experimental results are presentedwhich show the tuning of the system improves the performance by 24% and 64% for thehorizontal and vertical motion, respectively. Experimental characterization has also beenundertaken to show the system can accurately achieve outputs of up to 7 deg and resultsfor position tracking in both axes are also presented. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4024226]Keywords: ionic polymer-metal composites (IPMC), micromanipulation, iterativefeedback tuning (IFT), design, control, actuator