Haptic Feedback for Injecting Biological Cells using Miniature Compliant Mechanisms

We present a real-time haptics-aided injection technique\ud for biological cells using miniature compliant mechanisms.\ud Our system consists of a haptic robot operated by\ud a human hand, an XYZ stage for micro-positioning, a\ud camera for image capture, and a polydimethylsiloxane\ud (PDMS) miniature compliant device that serves the dual\ud purpose of an injecting tool and a force-sensor. In contrast\ud to existing haptics-based micromanipulation techniques\ud where an external force sensor is used, we use\ud visually captured displacements of the compliant mechanism\ud to compute the applied and reaction forces. The\ud human hand can feel the magnified manipulation force\ud through the haptic device in real-time while the motion\ud of the human hand is replicated on the mechanism side.\ud The images are captured using a camera at the rate of 30\ud frames per second for extracting the displacement data.\ud This is used to compute the forces at the rate of 30\ud Hz. The force computed in this manner is sent at the\ud rate of 1000 Hz to ensure stable haptic interaction. The\ud haptic cell-manipulation system was tested by injecting\ud into a zebrafish egg cell after validating the technique at\ud a size larger than that of the cell