Artificial Insemination System by Male and Female Micro Robots

In the biomedical field, the precise operation is required to achieve cell injection and genome analysis. To enhance these technologies, the special instrument with higher accuracy can provide the solution to these requirement. Several sophisticated instruments have been developed and some of them are equipped with the advanced sensor and actuator. In the meantime, the micro robotics has the potential application to many fields such the biomedical engineering as well as micro-engineering. For these years, our group have developed many small robots for the application to the precision engineering. In this report, the unique artificial insemination system operated by male and female micro robots is proposed and the successful experimental results are described. The small robot, which is approximately 1 cubic inch, is composed of piezo element and electromagnet to move precisely with the manner of an inch worm. And one small robot has the micro pipette actuated by the micro pump while another one has the special micro capillary which can incubate the fertilized egg. In the exper iment , the egg and the spermatozoon of fish are implemented into the micro injector and the micro incubator on these small robots. Two small robots can navigate each other to inseminate by using acoustic, optical and mechanical touch trigger switch sensors and reactive based sequential manner. And the fertilized egg in the micro incubator was successfully hatched after two weeks later under the temperature and water condition control instrument. Artificial Insemination System by Male and Female Micro Robots