Automatic Microassembly of Tissue Engineering Scaffold

Abstract

This thesis presents a workstation system for automatic assembly of tissue engineering (TE) scaffolds made from microscopic parts. The microparts (of dimension 0.5?0.5?0.2mm and 60?m wall thickness) are fabricated by using photolithography techniques. A microgripper is specially designed and fabricated to interface with the microparts. To measure the forces applied at the gripper tip, a force sensor is designed, fabricated and calibrated. The force sensor which has a full range of 500mN and a resolution of 3mN is used to implement an admittance force controlled insertion using a commercial precision stage. Visual-based alignment followed by an insertion is complemented by a haptic exploration strategy using force and position information. The system has successfully demonstrated fully automated construction of TE scaffolds composing of 50 microparts whose dimension error can be as large as 9%.