This article reviews the autonomous manipulation strategies of biological cells utilizing optical tweezers, mainly including optical direct and indirect manipulation strategies. The typical and latest achievements in the optical manipulation of cells are presented, and the existing challenges for autonomous optical manipulation of biological cells are also introduced. Moreover, the integrations of optical tweezers with other manipulation tools are presented, which broadens the applications of optical tweezers in the biomedical manipulation areas and will also foster new developments in cell-based physiology and pathology studies, such as cell migration, single cell surgery, and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD).

In this study, a cell puncture mechanism driven by a piezoelectric ceramic (PEA) is fabricated, and a novel precision robust motion controller is proposed to complete the cell puncture. A system dynamics model of the cell puncture mechanism is simplified by considering the hysteresis and disturbance as unknown terms to avoid the parameter identification of nonlinear dynamics in engineering applications. A sliding mode control (SMC) strategy with fast reaching law and proportional-integral- differential (PID)-type sliding surface, denoted as FPIDSMC, based on the simplified Bouc-Wen model is combined with time delay estimation (TDE) technology to form a novel controller, called FPID-TDE controller in this study. The stability of the controller is proven based on the Lyapunov theory. Computer simulation and semi-physical simulation experiments show the TDE technology can estimate and compensate accurately the unknown terms and does not require prior knowledge of unknown disturbance boundaries, thereby reducing controller gain. SMC can realize fast response speed, few steady-state errors, continuous output, and avoid chattering. Through a micropuncture experiment of a zebrafish embryo, the proposed FPID-TDE controller is shown to have high efficiency, high precision, and strong robustness. Therefore, the proposed FPID-TDE controller can be applied effectively to other micro nano-positioning systems driven by PEA.