Improving Optical Micromanipulation with Force-Feedback Bilateral Coupling

Micromanipulation is challenging due to the specific physical effects governing the microworld. Interactive approaches using only visual feedback are limited to the 2D image of the microscope, and have forcibly lower bandwidth. Recently, haptic feedback teleoperation systems have been developed to try to overcome those difficulties. This paper explores the case of an optical tweezers platform coupled to an haptic device providing transparent force feedback. The impact of haptic feedback regarding user dexterity on tactile exploration tasks is studied using 3 μm microbeads and a test bench with micro sized shapes. The results reveal a consistent improvement in both users' trajectory tracking and their control of the contact forces. This also validates the experimental setup which performed reliably on 140 different trials of the evaluation.