Design and Development of a Dexterous Bilateral Robotic Microinjection System Based on Haptic Feedback

In this paper, a dexterous bilateral robotic system with haptic feedback is designed and developed for microinjection of biological samples. For the first time, the robotic system has been developed for microinjection of both zebrafish larvae and embryos. The master device is constructed by a seven-degree-of-freedom (7-DOF) haptic interface. As the slave device, a 6-DOF microinjection robot is developed by integrating a 3-DOF micropositioning stage and a 3-DOF micromanipulator. One uniqueness of the proposed robotic system is that the injection targets can be placed directly in the Petri dish without prior pose adjustment. The master haptic device not only enables remote control of the microinjection robot by a human operator, but also provides an intuitive haptics feedback to the operator for executing the microinjection operation with a high success rate. The haptic interface is deployed as a viscous damping to enhance the smoothness and stability of its movement. Moreover, a hybrid bilateral control architecture is developed for the system to achieve ideal performance of position tracking and haptic telepresence. A prototype system is developed for performance test. The experimental results of individual and continuous microinjection of zebrafish larvae demonstrate fine position/force tracking capability and flexibility. Note to Practitioners-Microinjection is a universal operation in biological study for delivering foreign materials into biological samples. The existing manual and automated microinjections have limited flexibility. Meanwhile, the stand-alone visual information cannot provide enough telepresence to the operator, which results in low success rate and poor repeatability. This paper proposes a new haptics-based dexterous bilateral robotic system dedicated to microinjection task of both zebrafish larvae and embryos. Both the master haptic interface and slave microinjection robot exhibit multi-DOF motion, which enables a dexterous micromanipulation with high success rate for the human operator. The feasibility of the reported robotic system has been verified by performing microinjection operation of different targets.