Interactive Optical Tweezers with Tactile Feedback – IOTA

IOTA project aims to establish a novel scientific instrument for biomedical applications, which will extend an operator's physical interaction abilities into a Petri dish, directly in contact with living cells and similar samples. The system combines laser manipulation techniques and a tactile force feedback user interface into a complete robotic system which will allow the operator to directly probe and manipulate microscale biochemical samples}, ranging from large molecules and cells to tissues. Such a system addresses the needs of fields such as biology, chemistry and medical sciences. Hence its design is aimed to hide the complexity of the robotic parts from the operator and provide him with an easy-to-use, intuitive and familiar interface using the widespread touchscreen approach, augmented with tactile feedback.

However, the abundance of information to transmit such interactions to the operator is well beyond the capabilities of actual devices. The system proposed here relies on two novel developments: the first one concerns the closed-loop force and position control of engineered micro-structures in liquid solution by means of optical traps, to be used as tools and probes. The second one concerns the user interface, and will provide the means to render co-locally visual cues and high-fidelity haptic information through the modulation of friction forces on a glass plate.