  The treatment of malaria is a global health challenge that stands to benefit
from the widespread introduction of a vaccine for the disease. A method has
been developed to create a live organism vaccine using the sporozoites (SPZ) of
the parasite Plasmodium falciparum (Pf), which are concentrated in the salivary
glands of infected mosquitoes. Current manual dissection methods to obtain
these PfSPZ are not optimally efficient for large-scale vaccine production. We
propose an improved dissection procedure and a mechanical fixture that
increases the rate of mosquito dissection and helps to deskill this stage of
the production process. We further demonstrate the automation of a key step in
this production process, the picking and placing of mosquitoes from a staging
apparatus into a dissection assembly. This unit test of a robotic mosquito
pick-and-place system is performed using a custom-designed micro-gripper
attached to a four degree of freedom (4-DOF) robot under the guidance of a
computer vision system. Mosquitoes are autonomously grasped and pulled to a
pair of notched dissection blades to remove the head of the mosquito, allowing
access to the salivary glands. Placement into these blades is adapted based on
output from computer vision to accommodate for the unique anatomy and
orientation of each grasped mosquito. In this pilot test of the system on 50
mosquitoes, we demonstrate a 100% grasping accuracy and a 90% accuracy in
placing the mosquito with its neck within the blade notches such that the head
can be removed. This is a promising result for this difficult and non-standard
pick-and-place task.
