Numerous types of microhands have recently been designed to perform micromanipulation tasks that are crucial for micromachine assembly, microsurgery operations and biological cell analysis. Because most current microsystems are task-specific, the realization of a general-purpose microhand that is compatible with a wide range of applications is necessary. There are two problems to be solved in order to realize a general-purpose micromanipulation system however. First, creating a large workspace with high resolution in which to grasp multisized microobjects is still a challenging feature for available microhands. Second, precise motion throughout a large workspace for the transportation of microobjects in the limited space of a microscope is another arduous task. In this study, we propose a microhand system that achieves multiscalability, i.e., a large workspace with precise positioning for the grasping and transportation of multisized microobjects. This system has been designed with an optimized parallel mechanism in which the manipulability of different-sized microobjects is improved from 1–45 µm to 1–132 µm. The proposed rough-to-fine motion strategy that allows us to achieve a large range with high resolution positioning ability for performing the transportation task moreover minimized error from 17 µm to 0.18 µm.
Micro and nano-platforms for biological cell analysis
