Path planning for 3D transportation of biological cells with optical tweezers

Manipulation of biological cells has recently drawn tremendous attention for its wide applications in biomedical fields such as cell-cell interaction, drug discovery, and tissue engineering. This paper presents a rapidly-exploring random trees (RRT) based path planner for transportation of biological cells in robotic transportation with optical tweezers in three dimensions (3D). By integrating the RRT algorithm into the optical tweezers manipulation system, we can successfully transport biological cells with high precision while avoiding obstacles during cell movement. Simulations and experiment are performed in transporting yeast cells to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.