Interactive haptic simulation of cell microinjection task

Abstract

The cell microinjection task in space requires the operator on the ground hold the handle of haptic device to control the remote dexterous manipulator in Space Cabin to needle into the cell for gene injection or nucleus extraction. To prevent the failure of punctures, the reliable force feedback plays a key role to adjust the position and velocity of the needle of manipulator in the process. In this paper, a feasible haptic rendering approach is presented to carry out the cell microinjection teleoperation. The cell is modeled as a sphere-tree adjacently connected with deformed springs with its cytomembrane and inner nucleus physical properties. A configuration-based constrained optimization method is performed to calculate the feedback force. We also propose a locking method to maintain the force feedback stable when the needle passes through cell boundaries with different physical properties. Finally, three sets of experiments are designed to validate the efficiency and stability of our method in cell microinjection.