Modelling and robust position and orientation control of a non-affine nonlinear dielectrophoresis-based micromanipulation system

Abstract

Conventional dielectrophoresis and electrorotation have attracted widespread attention in the field of individual micro-object manipulation in recent years. The improvement of current dielectrophoresis-based micromanipulation systems’ flexibility, accuracy and level of automation are essential requirements of dielectrophoresis-based micromanipulation techniques. For the purpose of high-precision automatic positioning and orientation control of a micro-object, we have developed approximate analytical expressions to describe the conventional dielectrophoretic force and electrorotation torque generated by quadrupole polynomial electrodes on a spherical micro-particle. Numerical simulations based on the finite element method are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modelling method. In addition, the non-affine nonlinear dynamic models of the dielectrophoresis-based micromanipulation subsystems are established. Furthermore, an uncertainty and disturbance estimator based dynamic sliding mode controller is proposed and applied to achieve a robust sequential position and orientation control system. The stability of the closed-loop system is established. The performance of the proposed control is demonstrated through simulation studies.

Theoretical investigation of dielectrophoretic effect for carbon nanotubes in optoelectronic tweezers

“…Compared with these technologies, the dielectrophoretic force, generated by an applied non-uniform electrical field, is capable of spontaneously performing aggregation, sorting, and transportation based on the mature microelectromechanical systems manufacturing process (Luo et al, 2018). To the best of our knowledge, the development rate of DEP research based on literature and patents is faster than that of optical and magnetic techniques.…”