Evaluation of telerobotic shared control for efficient manipulation of single-cells in microinjection

Microinjection is the highly efficient delivery method of exogenous materials into cells, and it has been widely used in biomedical research areas such as transgenics and genomics. However, this direct injection task is time consuming and laborious, resulting in low throughput and poor reproducibility. This paper describes a telerobotic shared control (TSC) framework for the microinjection with high manipulation efficiencies, in which a micromanipulator is controlled by the shared motion commands of both the human operator (direct manipulation) and the autonomous controller. To determine the optimal gains between the operator and the controller, we proposed a quantitative evaluation method using Fitts' and steering laws. The results showed that a 40%-60% weighting on the human operator produced better performance for both speed and accuracy of task completion, and suggested that some level of automation or human involvement is important for microinjection tasks.