Hybrid Optothermal-Magnetic Mobile Microgripper for In-Liquid Micromanipulation
Belal Ahmad, Antoine Barbot, Gwenn Ulliac, Aude Bolopion
Abstract
In this letter, we propose a mobile microgripper actuated using laser optothermal and magnetic actuation in liquid environments. This hybrid actuation scheme allows the full decoupling between the in-plane positioning of the mobile microgripper and the actuation of its gripping mechanism, which reduces the control complexity of such microgrippers. The developed mobile microgripper with the dimensions of 1500 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times 700\times$</tex-math></inline-formula> 250 μ <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathrm{m^{3}}$</tex-math></inline-formula> can realize an open and close gripping motion of 35 μm, a magnetic positioning accuracy of 6 μm for translation over an area of 1 × 1 mm and 2 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{\circ }$</tex-math></inline-formula> for rotation, and a laser steering accuracy of 25 μm. Finally, the mobile microgripper is used to control the position of a microbead inside a liquid environment. Our work provides a proof of concept of laser optothermal-magnetic hybrid actuation, which has the potential to enhance the deployment of microtools in biomedical applications including cell manipulation and lab-on-chip devices.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ral2023_hybridoptotherma,
title = {Hybrid Optothermal-Magnetic Mobile Microgripper for In-Liquid Micromanipulation},
author = {Belal Ahmad and Antoine Barbot and Gwenn Ulliac and Aude Bolopion},
booktitle = {RA-L 2023},
year = {2023}
}