How Should Microrobots Swim?

Microrobots have the potential to dramatically change many aspects of medicine by navigating through bodily fluids to perform targeted diagnosis and therapy. Researchers have proposed numerous micro-robotic swimming methods, with the vast majority utilizing magnetic fields to wirelessly power and co...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The International journal of robotics research 2009-11, Vol.28 (11-12), p.1434-1447
Main Authors: Abbott, Jake J., Peyer, Kathrin E., Lagomarsino, Marco Cosentino, Zhang, Li, Dong, Lixin, Kaliakatsos, Ioannis K., Nelson, Bradley J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Magnetic fields
Medical technology
Microbots
Robotics
Vision systems
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Microrobots have the potential to dramatically change many aspects of medicine by navigating through bodily fluids to perform targeted diagnosis and therapy. Researchers have proposed numerous micro-robotic swimming methods, with the vast majority utilizing magnetic fields to wirelessly power and control the microrobot. In this paper, we compare three promising methods of microrobot swimming (using magnetic fields to rotate helical propellers that mimic bacterial flagella, using magnetic fields to oscillate a magnetic head with a rigidly attached elastic tail, and pulling directly with magnetic field gradients) considering practical hardware limitations in the generation of magnetic fields. We find that helical propellers and elastic tails have very comparable performance, and they generally become more desirable than gradient pulling as size decreases and as distance from the magnetic-field-generation source increases. We provide a discussion of why helical propellers are likely the best overall choice for in vivo applications.
ISSN:0278-3649
1741-3176
DOI:10.1177/0278364909341658