2D robotic control of a planar dielectrophoresis-based system

Nanosciences have recently proposed a lot of proofs of concept of innovative nanocomponents and especially nanosensors. Going from the current proofs of concept on this scale to reliable industrial systems requires the emergence of a new generation of manufacturing methods able to move, position and sort micro-nano-components. We propose to develop `No Weight Robots-NWR' that use noncontact transmission of movement (e.g. dielectrophoresis, magnetophoresis) to manipulate micro-nano-objects which could enable simultaneous high throughput and high precision. This paper focuses on developing a 2D robotic control of the trajectory of a micro-object manipulated by a dielectrophoresis system. A 2D dynamic model is used to establish an open loop control law by a numerical inversion. Exploiting this control law, a high speed trajectory tracking (10 Hz) and high precision positioning can be achieved. Several simulated and experimental results are shown to evaluate this control strategy and discuss its performance.