Automatic Microassembly System for tissue engineering- Assisted with top-view and force control

Abstract

One of the main problems of present automatic microassembly techniques is the lack of the implementation of force control, especially the control of the assembly force or the insertion force. This thesis develops techniques for efficient z-axis microassembly based on force control of commercially available stages. These techniques arise from an application in tissue engineering. Microassembly technique has shown much potential in facilitating tissue regeneration tasks. In this work, an automatic system is developed for building 3D tissue engineering scaffold by assembling microscopic building blocks. The idea is to coat the micro parts with specific and individual cells and bioagents, and then assemble them into 3D scaffold in biocompatible environment with certain desired spatial distributions. Experimental results show high efficiency and high yield of the system. With the admittance controller, the system is robust to the variation of the dimension of micro parts.