Bilateral Magnetic Micromanipulation Using Off-Board Force Sensor

This paper introduces a novel haptic-enabled magnetic micromanipulation platform with promising potential for extensive biological and biomedical applications. This platform consists of two separated basic sites: 1) the slave site that uses a controlled magnetic field for manipulating a ferromagnetic microdevice and 2) the master site that uses a haptic-enabled device for the position and the force communication between the human operator and the microdevice. Due to the size restriction of the microdevice, attaching force sensors to the microdevice is impractical. Thus, to preserve a high feeling of a microdomain environment for the human operator, the applied force/torque from the environment to the microdevice is estimated with a novel off-board force sensing mechanism. This force sensing mechanism uses the produced magnetic flux information and the real position of the microdevice to estimate the environmental force applied to the microdevice. A scaled force-position teleoperation scheme is employed for this haptic application to scale down the macrodomain position for microdomain application and scale up the microdomain force for macrodomain sensing of the human operator. Conducting several experiments in different conditions, precise motion tracking with high accurate force transfer to human operator has been reported, RMS of position tracking errors of 0.2 mm with 1.27-μN accuracy force sensing for single-axis motion.