Design and Development of a Teleoperated Robotic Microinjection System With Haptic Feedback

This letter proposes a new teleoperated robotic system with haptic feedback dedicated to biological microinjection. The system consists of a custom-built master device and a slave micromanipulator device. Microinjection task is conducted by the micromanipulator equipped with a microforce sensor. The slave device is controlled by a human operator via the master device, which includes a touch device and a haptic device. The haptic device is designed based on the working principle of a syringe, which is driven by a voice coil motor. The haptic device enables the operator to feel the microinjection process when the operator holds the handle by a thumb. Through the kinematics analysis and workspace matching, a position mapping method is introduced to convert the position of the master device to that of the slave micromanipulator. Experimental calibration results show that the microforce sensor provides the resolution of 0.101 mN. The haptic device responds quickly to the contact force with an average response time of 0.2 s. Moreover, the position tracking results show that the slave micromanipulator can follow the command of the master device faithfully. With the intuitive haptic device, the operator can feel the contact and determine the injection status for improving the success rate of the microinjection task.