Micro Robotic Manipulation System for the Force Stimulation of Muscle Fiber-like Cell Structure

Many previous works have facilitated muscle cell (C2C12) alignment to form fiber-like cell structures. However, there still remains a challenge how to induce C2C12 myoblasts in the cell structures to differentiate into matured myocytes to form a functional muscle tissue, while external mechanical stimulation has been proved to have good effects on proliferation and differentiation of myoblasts. In this paper, we proposed a vision-based micro robotic manipulation system to achieve automatic mechanical stimulation for one single muscle fiber-like cell structures (MFCS). A tube, which is attached to a three degree-of-freedom (DOF) manipulator, and a probe are employed to apply the uniaxial mechanical stimulation to train the MFCS. To measure the force applied on MFCS, a vision-based measuring and correction method is utilized, which decrease the error by 74%. Moreover, based on the viscoelastic property of the MFCS, a feedback control algorithm has been applied to compensate for the force loss to realize the force stimulation. And the final value of force remains 699 ± 1μN after 110s experiment.