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 system to facilitate the safe handling/probing of biological cells. The robotic manipulator has a modular design, where each module provides two degrees-of-freedom (2DOF) and the overall system can be made up of a number of modules depending on the desired level of dexterity. The module design has been optimized in simulation using an integrated ionic polymer-metal composite (IPMC) model and mechanical mechanism model to ensure the best system performance from the available IPMC material. The optimal system consists of two modules with each DOF actuated by a 27.5 mm long by 10 mm wide actuator. A 1DOF control structure has been developed, which is adaptively tuned using a model-free iterative feedback tuning (IFT) algorithm to adjust the controller parameters to optimize the system tracking performance. Experimental results are presented which show the tuning of the system improves the performance by 24% and 64% for the horizontal and vertical motion, respectively. Experimental characterization has also been undertaken to show the system can accurately achieve outputs of up to 7 deg and results for position tracking in both axes are also presented.