A magnetic bilateral tele-manipulation system using paramagnetic microparticles for micromanipulation of nonmagnetic objects

This study presents a scaled-bilateral telemanipulation system for magnetic-based control of paramagnetic microparticles. This bilateral control system consists of a haptic device (master-robot) and an electromagnetic system with four orthogonal electromagnetic coils. The electromagnetic system generates magnetic field gradients to control the motion of the microparticle (slave-microrobot). A systematic robust tele-manipulation control design of the microparticles is achieved using disturbance observers (DOBs) to estimate the interaction forces at both the master-robot and slave-microrobot. Experimental results show that point-to-point motion control of the slave-microrobots results in maximum position error of 8 µm in the steady-state. Furthermore, we demonstrate experimentally that interaction forces of tens of micro Newtons, between the slave-microrobot and non-magnetic microbeads, can be estimated using DOBs and scaled-up to the sensory range of the operator.