Microbubbles for High-Speed Assembly of Cell-Laden Vascular-Like Microtube
Xiaoming Liu, Qing Shi, Huaping Wang, Tao Sun, Ning Yu, Qiang Huang, Toshio Fukuda
Abstract
Vascular-like microtube takes an important role in delivering oxygen and nutrient to keep cell alive in the generated tissue. In this paper, we present an automated micromanipulation system to assemble 2-D gel micro-rings to vascular-like microtubes by means of generating and controlling microbubbles. The detailed automated assembly process is described. To enable the automated assembly, real-time image processing has been utilized to detect end-effectors and gel micro-rings in 2-D X-Y plane. Additionally, we can acquire an estimated depth information by implementing the optimized template match. The motion model of the microbubbles is analyzed and applied to control the microbubbles. As a preliminary test, a cell-laden microtube consisting of 33 layers gel micro-rings is fabricated. Experimental results show that the bubble-based assembly method and the automated micromanipulation system allow high efficiency and high success rate for the assembly of microtubes.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ral2016_microbubblesforh,
title = {Microbubbles for High-Speed Assembly of Cell-Laden Vascular-Like Microtube},
author = {Xiaoming Liu and Qing Shi and Huaping Wang and Tao Sun and Ning Yu and Qiang Huang and Toshio Fukuda},
booktitle = {RA-L 2016},
year = {2016}
}