Modelling and robust position and orientation control of a non-affine nonlinear dielectrophoresis-based micromanipulation system

Abstract

Conventional dielectrophoresis and electrorotation have attracted widespread attention in the field of individual micro-object manipulation in recent years. The improvement of current dielectrophoresis-based micromanipulation systems’ flexibility, accuracy and level of automation are essential requirements of dielectrophoresis-based micromanipulation techniques. For the purpose of high-precision automatic positioning and orientation control of a micro-object, we have developed approximate analytical expressions to describe the conventional dielectrophoretic force and electrorotation torque generated by quadrupole polynomial electrodes on a spherical micro-particle. Numerical simulations based on the finite element method are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modelling method. In addition, the non-affine nonlinear dynamic models of the dielectrophoresis-based micromanipulation subsystems are established. Furthermore, an uncertainty and disturbance estimator based dynamic sliding mode controller is proposed and applied to achieve a robust sequential position and orientation control system. The stability of the closed-loop system is established. The performance of the proposed control is demonstrated through simulation studies.