An Autonomous and Hardware-Agnostic Vision-Servoed System for Microdevice Injection

Abstract

Automated manipulation of nanoliter-scale implantable microdevices (IMDs) typically relies on complex, custom-built robotic setups that are difficult to reproduce and require extensive manual calibration. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an easily deployable and highly reproducible vision-servoed manipulation system for IMDs. Based on standard commercial off-the-shelf devices, the proposed platform is hardware-agnostic and eliminates the need for tedious manual calibration. The automated workflow seamlessly integrates coarse positioning, auto-focus, and marker-aided centering to achieve robust precision. The system is validated using a sub-nanoliter IMD, the microscale optoelectronic tetherless electrode (MOTE). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework requires minimal manual intervention and significantly reduces operating time by 47.2 % compared to manual injection performed by an experienced user. These results pave the way for economical, high-throughput, and automated IMD-based in vitro and in vivo experiments, and beyond.